Abstract: A contextual rescoring method is proposed for improving the detection of body joints of a pictorial structure model for human pose estimation. A set of mid-level parts is incorporated in the model, and their detections are used to extract spatial and score-related features relative to other body joint hypotheses. A technique is proposed for the automatic discovery of a compact subset of poselets that covers a set of validation images
while maximizing precision. A rescoring mechanism is defined as a set-based boosting classifier that computes a new score for body joint detections, given its relationship to detections of other body joints and mid-level parts in the image. This new score complements the unary potential of a discriminatively trained pictorial structure model. Experiments on two benchmarks show performance improvements when considering the proposed mid-level image representation and rescoring approach in comparison with other pictorial structure-based approaches.