# Computer Vision to the Rescue: Infant Postural Symmetry Estimation from Incongruent Annotations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09352 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09352/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [Distribution-Aware Coordinate Representation for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06278/) (2019)
- [Cascaded deep monocular 3D human pose estimation with evolutionary training data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07778/) (2020)
- [Invariant Representation Learning for Infant Pose Estimation with Small Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06100/) (2020)
- [Heuristic Weakly Supervised 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10996/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Efficient Domain Adaptation via Generative Prior for 3D Infant Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12043/) (2023)
- [Automatic Assessment of Infant Face and Upper-Body Symmetry as Early Signs of Torticollis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15022/) (2022)
- [Multiple Toddler Tracking in Indoor Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17656/) (2023)
- [Challenges in Video-Based Infant Action Recognition: A Critical Examination of the State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12300/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bilateral postural symmetry plays a key role as a potential risk marker for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and as a symptom of congenital muscular torticollis (CMT) in infants, but current methods of assessing symmetry require laborious clinical expert assessments. In this paper, we develop a computer vision based infant symmetry assessment system, leveraging 3D human pose estimation for infants. Evaluation and calibration of our system against ground truth assessments is complicated by our findings from a survey of human ratings of angle and symmetry, that such ratings exhibit low inter-rater reliability. To rectify this, we develop a Bayesian estimator of the ground truth derived from a probabilistic graphical model of fallible human raters. We show that the 3D infant pose estimation model can achieve 68% area under the receiver operating characteristic curve performance in predicting the Bayesian aggregate labels, compared to only 61% from a 2D infant pose estimation model and 60% from a 3D adult pose estimation model, highlighting the importance of 3D poses and infant domain knowledge in assessing infant body symmetry. Our survey analysis also suggests that human ratings are susceptible to higher levels of bias and inconsistency, and hence our final 3D pose-based symmetry assessment system is calibrated but not directly supervised by Bayesian aggregate human ratings, yielding higher levels of consistency and lower levels of inter-limb assessment bias.