People Watching: Human Actions as a Cue for Single View Geometry

We present an approach which exploits the coupling between human actions and scene geometry to use human pose as a cue for single-view 3D scene understanding. Our method builds upon recent advances in still-image pose estimation to extract functional and geometric constraints on the scene. These constraints are then used to improve single-view 3D scene understanding approaches. The proposed method is validated on monocular time-lapse sequences from YouTube and still images of indoor scenes gathered from the Internet. We demonstrate that observing people performing different actions can significantly improve estimates of 3D scene geometry.