I know that HOG is pretty state of the art for person detection, but in its original form HOG is only a detection method, and I don't believe it is particularly fast either (there is a significant speedup which takes the sliding window and rejects unlikely possibilities early, but it has been patented).
What is the current state of the art approach for determining the pose of a person (including close poses like a head shot, and hand shot, etc...), and for segmenting the person from the background?
The setting here is still images.
