In this study, a novel sleep pose identification method has been proposed for classifying 12 different sleep postures using a two-step deep learning process. For this purpose, transfer learning as an initial stage retrains a well-known CNN network (VGG-19) to categorise the data into four main pose classes, namely: supine, left, right, and prone. According to the decision made by VGG-19, subsets of the image data are next passed to one of four dedicated sub-class CNNs. As a result, the pose estimation label is further refined from one of four sleep pose labels to one of 12 sleep pose labels. 10 participants contributed for recording infrared (IR) images of 12 pre-defined sleep positions. Participants were covered by a blanket to occlude the original pose and present a more realistic sleep situation. Finally, we have compared our results with (1) the traditional CNN learning from scratch and (2) retrained VGG-19 network in one stage. The average accuracy increased from 74.5% & 78.1% to 85.6% compared with (1) & (2) respectively.