# Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Learning for Hierarchical Infant Pose Recognition with Synthetic Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01892 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01892/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [Temporal Segment Networks: Towards Good Practices for Deep Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00859/) (2016)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [3D human pose estimation in video with temporal convolutions and semi-supervised training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11742/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Pose Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00134/) (2016)
- [Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13586/) (2021)
- [Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03345/) (2019)
- [PersonLab: Person Pose Estimation and Instance Segmentation with a Bottom-Up, Part-Based, Geometric Embedding Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08225/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.02200/) (2016)
- [Invariant Representation Learning for Infant Pose Estimation with Small Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06100/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Efficient Domain Adaptation via Generative Prior for 3D Infant Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12043/) (2023)
- [The Blind Spot in 2D Infants' Pose Estimation:Robust Learning from Noisy Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04009/) (2026)
- [ToddlerAct: A Toddler Action Recognition Dataset for Gross Motor Development Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00349/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Alberta Infant Motor Scale (AIMS) is a well-known assessment scheme that evaluates the gross motor development of infants by recording the number of specific poses achieved. With the aid of the image-based pose recognition model, the AIMS evaluation procedure can be shortened and automated, providing early diagnosis or indicator of potential developmental disorder. Due to limited public infant-related datasets, many works use the SMIL-based method to generate synthetic infant images for training. However, this domain mismatch between real and synthetic training samples often leads to performance degradation during inference. In this paper, we present a CNN-based model which takes any infant image as input and predicts the coarse and fine-level pose labels. The model consists of an image branch and a pose branch, which respectively generates the coarse-level logits facilitated by the unsupervised domain adaptation and the 3D keypoints using the HRNet with SMPLify optimization. Then the outputs of these branches will be sent into the hierarchical pose recognition module to estimate the fine-level pose labels. We also collect and label a new AIMS dataset, which contains 750 real and 4000 synthetic infants images with AIMS pose labels. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly align the distribution of synthetic and real-world datasets, thus achieving accurate performance on fine-grained infant pose recognition.