Multi-person pose estimation (MPPE) estimates keypoints for all individuals present in an image. MPPE is a fundamental task for several applications in computer vision and virtual reality. Unfortunately, there are currently no transformer-based models that can perform MPPE in real time. The paper presents a family of transformer-based models capable of performing multi-person 2D pose estimation in real-time. Our approach utilizes a modified decoder architecture and keypoint similarity metrics to generate both positive and negative queries, thereby enhancing the quality of the selected queries within the architecture. Compared to state-of-the-art models, our proposed models train much faster, using 5 to 10 times fewer epochs, with competitive inference times without requiring quantization libraries to speed up the model. Furthermore, our proposed models provide competitive results or outperform alternative models, often using significantly fewer parameters.
Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation (CAPE) localizes keypoints across diverse object categories with a single model, using one or a few annotated support images. Recent works have shown that using a pose graph (i.e., treating keypoints as nodes in a graph rather than isolated points) helps handle occlusions and break symmetry. However, these methods assume a static pose graph with equal-weight edges, leading to suboptimal results. We introduce EdgeCape, a novel framework that overcomes these limitations by predicting the graph's edge weights which optimizes localization. To further leverage structural priors, we propose integrating Markovian Structural Bias, which modulates the self-attention interaction between nodes based on the number of hops between them. We show that this improves the model's ability to capture global spatial dependencies. Evaluated on the MP-100 benchmark, which includes 100 categories and over 20K images, EdgeCape achieves state-of-the-art results in the 1-shot setting and leads among similar-sized methods in the 5-shot setting, significantly improving keypoint localization accuracy. Our code is publicly available.
Estimating 3D human poses from 2D images is challenging due to occlusions and projective acquisition. Learning-based approaches have been largely studied to address this challenge, both in single and multi-view setups. These solutions however fail to generalize to real-world cases due to the lack of (multi-view) 'in-the-wild' images paired with 3D poses for training. For this reason, we propose combining 2D pose estimation, for which large and rich training datasets exist, and 2D-to-3D pose lifting, using a transformer-based network that can be trained from synthetic 2D-3D pose pairs. Our experiments demonstrate decreases up to 45% in MPJPE errors compared to the 3D pose obtained by triangulating the 2D poses. The framework's source code is available at https://github.com/aghasemzadeh/OpenMPL .
Whole-body pose estimation is a challenging task that requires simultaneous prediction of keypoints for the body, hands, face, and feet. Whole-body pose estimation aims to predict fine-grained pose information for the human body, including the face, torso, hands, and feet, which plays an important role in the study of human-centric perception and generation and in various applications. In this work, we present RTMW (Real-Time Multi-person Whole-body pose estimation models), a series of high-performance models for 2D/3D whole-body pose estimation. We incorporate RTMPose model architecture with FPN and HEM (Hierarchical Encoding Module) to better capture pose information from different body parts with various scales. The model is trained with a rich collection of open-source human keypoint datasets with manually aligned annotations and further enhanced via a two-stage distillation strategy. RTMW demonstrates strong performance on multiple whole-body pose estimation benchmarks while maintaining high inference efficiency and deployment friendliness. We release three sizes: m/l/x, with RTMW-l achieving a 70.2 mAP on the COCO-Wholebody benchmark, making it the first open-source model to exceed 70 mAP on this benchmark. Meanwhile, we explored the performance of RTMW in the task of 3D whole-body pose estimation, conducting image-based monocular 3D whole-body pose estimation in a coordinate classification manner. We hope this work can benefit both academic research and industrial applications. The code and models have been made publicly available at: https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmpose/tree/main/projects/rtmpose
Conventional 2D pose estimation models are constrained by their design to specific object categories. This limits their applicability to predefined objects. To overcome these limitations, category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) emerged as a solution. CAPE aims to facilitate keypoint localization for diverse object categories using a unified model, which can generalize from minimal annotated support images. Recent CAPE works have produced object poses based on arbitrary keypoint definitions annotated on a user-provided support image. Our work departs from conventional CAPE methods, which require a support image, by adopting a text-based approach instead of the support image. Specifically, we use a pose-graph, where nodes represent keypoints that are described with text. This representation takes advantage of the abstraction of text descriptions and the structure imposed by the graph. Our approach effectively breaks symmetry, preserves structure, and improves occlusion handling. We validate our novel approach using the MP-100 benchmark, a comprehensive dataset spanning over 100 categories and 18,000 images. Under a 1-shot setting, our solution achieves a notable performance boost of 1.07\%, establishing a new state-of-the-art for CAPE. Additionally, we enrich the dataset by providing text description annotations, further enhancing its utility for future research.
Model pre-training is essential in human-centric perception. In this paper, we first introduce masked image modeling (MIM) as a pre-training approach for this task. Upon revisiting the MIM training strategy, we reveal that human structure priors offer significant potential. Motivated by this insight, we further incorporate an intuitive human structure prior - human parts - into pre-training. Specifically, we employ this prior to guide the mask sampling process. Image patches, corresponding to human part regions, have high priority to be masked out. This encourages the model to concentrate more on body structure information during pre-training, yielding substantial benefits across a range of human-centric perception tasks. To further capture human characteristics, we propose a structure-invariant alignment loss that enforces different masked views, guided by the human part prior, to be closely aligned for the same image. We term the entire method as HAP. HAP simply uses a plain ViT as the encoder yet establishes new state-of-the-art performance on 11 human-centric benchmarks, and on-par result on one dataset. For example, HAP achieves 78.1% mAP on MSMT17 for person re-identification, 86.54% mA on PA-100K for pedestrian attribute recognition, 78.2% AP on MS COCO for 2D pose estimation, and 56.0 PA-MPJPE on 3DPW for 3D pose and shape estimation.
Foundation models, now powering most of the exciting applications in deep learning, are almost universally based on the Transformer architecture and its core attention module. Many subquadratic-time architectures such as linear attention, gated convolution and recurrent models, and structured state space models (SSMs) have been developed to address Transformers' computational inefficiency on long sequences, but they have not performed as well as attention on important modalities such as language. We identify that a key weakness of such models is their inability to perform content-based reasoning, and make several improvements. First, simply letting the SSM parameters be functions of the input addresses their weakness with discrete modalities, allowing the model to selectively propagate or forget information along the sequence length dimension depending on the current token. Second, even though this change prevents the use of efficient convolutions, we design a hardware-aware parallel algorithm in recurrent mode. We integrate these selective SSMs into a simplified end-to-end neural network architecture without attention or even MLP blocks (Mamba). Mamba enjoys fast inference (5$\times$ higher throughput than Transformers) and linear scaling in sequence length, and its performance improves on real data up to million-length sequences. As a general sequence model backbone, Mamba achieves state-of-the-art performance across several modalities such as language, audio, and genomics. On language modeling, our Mamba-3B model outperforms Transformers of the same size and matches Transformers twice its size, both in pretraining and downstream evaluation.
Traditional 2D pose estimation models are limited by their category-specific design, making them suitable only for predefined object categories. This restriction becomes particularly challenging when dealing with novel objects due to the lack of relevant training data. To address this limitation, category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) was introduced. CAPE aims to enable keypoint localization for arbitrary object categories using a few-shot single model, requiring minimal support images with annotated keypoints. We present a significant departure from conventional CAPE techniques, which treat keypoints as isolated entities, by treating the input pose data as a graph. We leverage the inherent geometrical relations between keypoints through a graph-based network to break symmetry, preserve structure, and better handle occlusions. We validate our approach on the MP-100 benchmark, a comprehensive dataset comprising over 20,000 images spanning over 100 categories. Our solution boosts performance by 0.98% under a 1-shot setting, achieving a new state-of-the-art for CAPE. Additionally, we enhance the dataset with skeleton annotations. Our code and data are publicly available.
Human silhouette extraction is a fundamental task in computer vision with applications in various downstream tasks. However, occlusions pose a significant challenge, leading to incomplete and distorted silhouettes. To address this challenge, we introduce POISE: Pose Guided Human Silhouette Extraction under Occlusions, a novel self-supervised fusion framework that enhances accuracy and robustness in human silhouette prediction. By combining initial silhouette estimates from a segmentation model with human joint predictions from a 2D pose estimation model, POISE leverages the complementary strengths of both approaches, effectively integrating precise body shape information and spatial information to tackle occlusions. Furthermore, the self-supervised nature of \POISE eliminates the need for costly annotations, making it scalable and practical. Extensive experimental results demonstrate its superiority in improving silhouette extraction under occlusions, with promising results in downstream tasks such as gait recognition. The code for our method is available https://github.com/take2rohit/poise.
This work aims to address an advanced keypoint detection problem: how to accurately detect any keypoints in complex real-world scenarios, which involves massive, messy, and open-ended objects as well as their associated keypoints definitions. Current high-performance keypoint detectors often fail to tackle this problem due to their two-stage schemes, under-explored prompt designs, and limited training data. To bridge the gap, we propose X-Pose, a novel end-to-end framework with multi-modal (i.e., visual, textual, or their combinations) prompts to detect multi-object keypoints for any articulated (e.g., human and animal), rigid, and soft objects within a given image. Moreover, we introduce a large-scale dataset called UniKPT, which unifies 13 keypoint detection datasets with 338 keypoints across 1,237 categories over 400K instances. Training with UniKPT, X-Pose effectively aligns text-to-keypoint and image-to-keypoint due to the mutual enhancement of multi-modal prompts based on cross-modality contrastive learning. Our experimental results demonstrate that X-Pose achieves notable improvements of 27.7 AP, 6.44 PCK, and 7.0 AP compared to state-of-the-art non-promptable, visual prompt-based, and textual prompt-based methods in each respective fair setting. More importantly, the in-the-wild test demonstrates X-Pose's strong fine-grained keypoint localization and generalization abilities across image styles, object categories, and poses, paving a new path to multi-object keypoint detection in real applications. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/X-Pose.
Recent studies on 2D pose estimation have achieved excellent performance on public benchmarks, yet its application in the industrial community still suffers from heavy model parameters and high latency. In order to bridge this gap, we empirically explore key factors in pose estimation including paradigm, model architecture, training strategy, and deployment, and present a high-performance real-time multi-person pose estimation framework, RTMPose, based on MMPose. Our RTMPose-m achieves 75.8% AP on COCO with 90+ FPS on an Intel i7-11700 CPU and 430+ FPS on an NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti GPU, and RTMPose-l achieves 67.0% AP on COCO-WholeBody with 130+ FPS. To further evaluate RTMPose's capability in critical real-time applications, we also report the performance after deploying on the mobile device. Our RTMPose-s achieves 72.2% AP on COCO with 70+ FPS on a Snapdragon 865 chip, outperforming existing open-source libraries. Code and models are released at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmpose/tree/1.x/projects/rtmpose.
Human-centric perceptions (e.g., pose estimation, human parsing, pedestrian detection, person re-identification, etc.) play a key role in industrial applications of visual models. While specific human-centric tasks have their own relevant semantic aspect to focus on, they also share the same underlying semantic structure of the human body. However, few works have attempted to exploit such homogeneity and design a general-propose model for human-centric tasks. In this work, we revisit a broad range of human-centric tasks and unify them in a minimalist manner. We propose UniHCP, a Unified Model for Human-Centric Perceptions, which unifies a wide range of human-centric tasks in a simplified end-to-end manner with the plain vision transformer architecture. With large-scale joint training on 33 human-centric datasets, UniHCP can outperform strong baselines on several in-domain and downstream tasks by direct evaluation. When adapted to a specific task, UniHCP achieves new SOTAs on a wide range of human-centric tasks, e.g., 69.8 mIoU on CIHP for human parsing, 86.18 mA on PA-100K for attribute prediction, 90.3 mAP on Market1501 for ReID, and 85.8 JI on CrowdHuman for pedestrian detection, performing better than specialized models tailored for each task.
We present a graph convolutional network with 2D pose estimation for the first time on child action recognition task achieving on par results with an RGB modality based model on a novel benchmark dataset containing unconstrained environment based videos.
Previous video-based human pose estimation methods have shown promising results by leveraging aggregated features of consecutive frames. However, most approaches compromise accuracy to mitigate jitter or do not sufficiently comprehend the temporal aspects of human motion. Furthermore, occlusion increases uncertainty between consecutive frames, which results in unsmooth results. To address these issues, we design an architecture that exploits the keypoint kinematic features with the following components. First, we effectively capture the temporal features by leveraging individual keypoint's velocity and acceleration. Second, the proposed hierarchical transformer encoder aggregates spatio-temporal dependencies and refines the 2D or 3D input pose estimated from existing estimators. Finally, we provide an online cross-supervision between the refined input pose generated from the encoder and the final pose from our decoder to enable joint optimization. We demonstrate comprehensive results and validate the effectiveness of our model in various tasks: 2D pose estimation, 3D pose estimation, body mesh recovery, and sparsely annotated multi-human pose estimation. Our code is available at https://github.com/KyungMinJin/HANet.
This paper introduces a novel human pose estimation benchmark, Human Pose with Millimeter Wave Radar (HuPR), that includes synchronized vision and radio signal components. This dataset is created using cross-calibrated mmWave radar sensors and a monocular RGB camera for cross-modality training of radar-based human pose estimation. There are two advantages of using mmWave radar to perform human pose estimation. First, it is robust to dark and low-light conditions. Second, it is not visually perceivable by humans and thus, can be widely applied to applications with privacy concerns, e.g., surveillance systems in patient rooms. In addition to the benchmark, we propose a cross-modality training framework that leverages the ground-truth 2D keypoints representing human body joints for training, which are systematically generated from the pre-trained 2D pose estimation network based on a monocular camera input image, avoiding laborious manual label annotation efforts. The framework consists of a new radar pre-processing method that better extracts the velocity information from radar data, Cross- and Self-Attention Module (CSAM), to fuse multi-scale radar features, and Pose Refinement Graph Convolutional Networks (PRGCN), to refine the predicted keypoint confidence heatmaps. Our intensive experiments on the HuPR benchmark show that the proposed scheme achieves better human pose estimation performance with only radar data, as compared to traditional pre-processing solutions and previous radio-frequency-based methods.
The state-of-the-art for monocular 3D human pose estimation in videos is dominated by the paradigm of 2D-to-3D pose uplifting. While the uplifting methods themselves are rather efficient, the true computational complexity depends on the per-frame 2D pose estimation. In this paper, we present a Transformer-based pose uplifting scheme that can operate on temporally sparse 2D pose sequences but still produce temporally dense 3D pose estimates. We show how masked token modeling can be utilized for temporal upsampling within Transformer blocks. This allows to decouple the sampling rate of input 2D poses and the target frame rate of the video and drastically decreases the total computational complexity. Additionally, we explore the option of pre-training on large motion capture archives, which has been largely neglected so far. We evaluate our method on two popular benchmark datasets: Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. With an MPJPE of 45.0 mm and 46.9 mm, respectively, our proposed method can compete with the state-of-the-art while reducing inference time by a factor of 12. This enables real-time throughput with variable consumer hardware in stationary and mobile applications. We release our code and models at https://github.com/goldbricklemon/uplift-upsample-3dhpe
Existing works on 2D pose estimation mainly focus on a certain category, e.g. human, animal, and vehicle. However, there are lots of application scenarios that require detecting the poses/keypoints of the unseen class of objects. In this paper, we introduce the task of Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation (CAPE), which aims to create a pose estimation model capable of detecting the pose of any class of object given only a few samples with keypoint definition. To achieve this goal, we formulate the pose estimation problem as a keypoint matching problem and design a novel CAPE framework, termed POse Matching Network (POMNet). A transformer-based Keypoint Interaction Module (KIM) is proposed to capture both the interactions among different keypoints and the relationship between the support and query images. We also introduce Multi-category Pose (MP-100) dataset, which is a 2D pose dataset of 100 object categories containing over 20K instances and is well-designed for developing CAPE algorithms. Experiments show that our method outperforms other baseline approaches by a large margin. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/luminxu/Pose-for-Everything.
While pose estimation is an important computer vision task, it requires expensive annotation and suffers from domain shift. In this paper, we investigate the problem of domain adaptive 2D pose estimation that transfers knowledge learned on a synthetic source domain to a target domain without supervision. While several domain adaptive pose estimation models have been proposed recently, they are not generic but only focus on either human pose or animal pose estimation, and thus their effectiveness is somewhat limited to specific scenarios. In this work, we propose a unified framework that generalizes well on various domain adaptive pose estimation problems. We propose to align representations using both input-level and output-level cues (pixels and pose labels, respectively), which facilitates the knowledge transfer from the source domain to the unlabeled target domain. Our experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under various domain shifts. Our method outperforms existing baselines on human pose estimation by up to 4.5 percent points (pp), hand pose estimation by up to 7.4 pp, and animal pose estimation by up to 4.8 pp for dogs and 3.3 pp for sheep. These results suggest that our method is able to mitigate domain shift on diverse tasks and even unseen domains and objects (e.g., trained on horse and tested on dog). Our code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/VisionLearningGroup/UDA_PoseEstimation.
Quantification of behavior is critical in applications ranging from neuroscience, veterinary medicine and animal conservation efforts. A common key step for behavioral analysis is first extracting relevant keypoints on animals, known as pose estimation. However, reliable inference of poses currently requires domain knowledge and manual labeling effort to build supervised models. We present a series of technical innovations that enable a new method, collectively called SuperAnimal, to develop unified foundation models that can be used on over 45 species, without additional human labels. Concretely, we introduce a method to unify the keypoint space across differently labeled datasets (via our generalized data converter) and for training these diverse datasets in a manner such that they don't catastrophically forget keypoints given the unbalanced inputs (via our keypoint gradient masking and memory replay approaches). These models show excellent performance across six pose benchmarks. Then, to ensure maximal usability for end-users, we demonstrate how to fine-tune the models on differently labeled data and provide tooling for unsupervised video adaptation to boost performance and decrease jitter across frames. If the models are fine-tuned, we show SuperAnimal models are 10-100$\times$ more data efficient than prior transfer-learning-based approaches. We illustrate the utility of our models in behavioral classification in mice and gait analysis in horses. Collectively, this presents a data-efficient solution for animal pose estimation.
In this paper we introduce a novel method to estimate the head pose of people in single images starting from a small set of head keypoints. To this purpose, we propose a regression model that exploits keypoints computed automatically by 2D pose estimation algorithms and outputs the head pose represented by yaw, pitch, and roll. Our model is simple to implement and more efficient with respect to the state of the art -- faster in inference and smaller in terms of memory occupancy -- with comparable accuracy. Our method also provides a measure of the heteroscedastic uncertainties associated with the three angles, through an appropriately designed loss function; we show there is a correlation between error and uncertainty values, thus this extra source of information may be used in subsequent computational steps. As an example application, we address social interaction analysis in images: we propose an algorithm for a quantitative estimation of the level of interaction between people, starting from their head poses and reasoning on their mutual positions. The code is available at https://github.com/cantarinigiorgio/HHP-Net.