IBM Developer Model Asset Exchange: Human Pose Estimator

The Human Pose Estimator model detects humans and their poses in a given image. The model first detects the humans in the input image and then identifies the body parts, including nose, neck, eyes, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles. Next, each pair of associated body parts is connected by a "pose line"; for example, as the following image shows, a line may connect the left eye to the nose, while another may connect the nose to the neck.

Each pose line is represented by a list [x1, y1, x2, y2], where the first pair of coordinates (x1, y1) is the start point of the line for one body part, while the second pair of coordinates (x2, y2) is the end point of the line for the other associated body part. The pose lines are assembled into full body poses for each of the humans detected in the image.

The model is based on the TF implementation of OpenPose model. The code in this repository deploys the model as a web service in a Docker container. This repository was developed as part of the IBM Developer Model Asset Exchange.

Model Metadata

References

• Zhe Cao, Tomas Simon, Shih-En Wei, Yaser Sheikh, "Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields", CVPR 2017.
• TF-Pose-Estimation Github Repository

Licenses

Pre-requisites:

• docker: The Docker command-line interface. Follow the installation instructions for your system.
• The minimum recommended resources for this model is 2GB Memory and 1 CPU.

Steps

1. Deploy from Docker Hub
2. Deploy on Kubernetes
3. Run Locally

Deploy from Docker Hub

To run the docker image, which automatically starts the model serving API, run:

$ docker run -it -p 5000:5000 codait/max-human-pose-estimator

This will pull a pre-built image from Docker Hub (or use an existing image if already cached locally) and run it. If you'd rather checkout and build the model locally you can follow the run locally steps below.

Deploy on Kubernetes

You can also deploy the model on Kubernetes using the latest docker image on Docker Hub.

On your Kubernetes cluster, run the following commands:

$ kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IBM/MAX-Human-Pose-Estimator/master/max-human-pose-estimator.yaml

The model will be available internally at port 5000, but can also be accessed externally through the NodePort.

Run Locally

1. Build the Model
2. Deploy the Model
3. Use the Model
4. Run the Notebook
5. Development
6. Cleanup

1. Build the Model

Clone this repository locally. In a terminal, run the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/IBM/MAX-Human-Pose-Estimator

Change directory into the repository base folder:

$ cd MAX-Human-Pose-Estimator

To build the docker image locally, run:

$ docker build -t max-human-pose-estimator .

All required model assets will be downloaded during the build process. Note that currently this docker image is CPU only (we will add support for GPU images later).

2. Deploy the Model

To run the docker image, which automatically starts the model serving API, run:

$ docker run -it -p 5000:5000 max-human-pose-estimator

3. Use the Model

The API server automatically generates an interactive Swagger documentation page. Go to http://localhost:5000 to load it. From there you can explore the API and also create test requests. Use the model/predict endpoint to load a test image (you can use one of the test images from the assets folder) and get predicted labels for the image from the API.

You can also test it on the command line, for example:

$ curl -F "file=@assets/Pilots.jpg" -XPOST http://localhost:5000/model/predict

You should see a JSON response like that below:

{
  "status": "ok",
  "predictions": [
    {
      "human_id": 0,
      "pose_lines": [
        {
          "line": [
            444,
            269,
            392,
            269
          ]
        },

        ...

        {
          "line": [
            439,
            195,
            464,
            197
          ]
        }
      ],
      "body_parts": [
        {
          "part_id": 0,
          "part_name": "Nose",
          "score": "0.83899",
          "x": 428,
          "y": 205
        },

        ...

        {
          "part_id": 17,
          "part_name": "LEar",
          "score": "0.81776",
          "x": 464,
          "y": 197
        }
      ]
    },

    ...

  ]
}

4. Run the Notebook

Once the model server is running, you can see how to use it by walking through the demo notebook. Note the demo requires jupyter, numpy, matplotlib, opencv-python, json, and requests.

Run the following command from the model repo base folder, in a new terminal window (leaving the model server running in the other terminal window):

$ jupyter notebook

This will start the notebook server. You can open the simple demo notebook by clicking on demo.ipynb.

5. Development

To run the Flask API app in debug mode, edit config.py to set DEBUG = True under the application settings. You will then need to rebuild the docker image (see step 1).

6. Cleanup

To stop the Docker container, type CTRL + C in your terminal.