Semi-supervised Body Parsing and Pose Estimation for Enhancing Infant General Movement Assessment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semi-supervised neural network model, SiamParseNet, that leverages body parsing and pose estimation to improve infant movement assessment, demonstrating state-of-the-art results and clinical relevance.

Contribution

The paper proposes SiamParseNet, a semi-supervised model with a novel training scheme and data augmentation, enhancing infant body parsing and pose estimation for better movement assessment.

Findings

SiamParseNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in infant body parsing.

The model generalizes well to clinical datasets for GMA.

Augmenting videos with pose info significantly improves assessment accuracy.

Abstract

General movement assessment (GMA) of infant movement videos (IMVs) is an effective method for early detection of cerebral palsy (CP) in infants. We demonstrate in this paper that end-to-end trainable neural networks for image sequence recognition can be applied to achieve good results in GMA, and more importantly, augmenting raw video with infant body parsing and pose estimation information can significantly improve performance. To solve the problem of efficiently utilizing partially labeled IMVs for body parsing, we propose a semi-supervised model, termed SiamParseNet (SPN), which consists of two branches, one for intra-frame body parts segmentation and another for inter-frame label propagation. During training, the two branches are jointly trained by alternating between using input pairs of only labeled frames and input of both labeled and unlabeled frames. We also investigate training data augmentation by proposing a factorized video generative adversarial network (FVGAN) to synthesize novel labeled frames for training. When testing, we employ a multi-source inference mechanism, where the final result for a test frame is either obtained via the segmentation branch or via propagation from a nearby key frame. We conduct extensive experiments for body parsing using SPN on two infant movement video datasets, where SPN coupled with FVGAN achieves state-of-the-art performance. We further demonstrate that SPN can be easily adapted to the infant pose estimation task with superior performance. Last but not least, we explore the clinical application of our method for GMA. We collected a new clinical IMV dataset with GMA annotations, and our experiments show that SPN models for body parsing and pose estimation trained on the first two datasets generalize well to the new clinical dataset and their results can significantly boost the CRNN-based GMA prediction performance.