Accurate Estimation of Body Height From a Single Depth Image via a Four-Stage Developing Network

Non-contact measurement of human body height can be very difficult under some circumstances. In this paper we address the problem of accurately estimating the height of a person with arbitrary postures from a single depth image. By introducing a novel part-based intermediate representation plus a four-stage increasingly complex deep neural network, we manage to achieve significantly higher accuracy than previous methods. We first describe the human body in the form of a segmentation of human torso as four nearly rigid parts and then predict their lengths respectively by 3 CNNs. Instead of directly adding the lengths of these parts together, we further construct another independent developing CNN that combines the intermediate representation, part lengths and depth information together to finally predict the body height results.Here we develop an increasingly complex network architecture and adopt a hybrid pooling to optimize training process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method that estimates height only from a single depth image. In experiments our average accuracy reaches at 99.1% for people in various positions and postures.