From Keypoints to Predictive Distributions: Post-Hoc Uncertainty for YOLO-Pose Models

원문 초록

YOLO-Pose models provide efficient multi-object keypoint localization, but do not quantify the associated spatial uncertainty. We introduce a lightweight post-hoc probabilistic extension that augments a trained YOLO-Pose model with calibrated bivariate predictive distributions over keypoint locations, centered at the model's original predictions. Concretely, we train additional probabilistic heads with an importance-weighted negative log-likelihood to predict an input-dependent $2\times2$ dispersion matrix for each keypoint, followed by Gaussian calibration for broad downstream compatibility or Student-$t$ calibration for distributional fidelity. Complementing this, we propose an evaluation protocol that combines a suite of distributional calibration diagnostics with average keypoint precision (AKP), a keypoint-level extension of the COCO AP protocol for assessing reliability rankings. Experiments on COCO with YOLO-NAS-Pose and YOLO26-Pose show that the learned uncertainty estimates enable keypoint-level reliability ranking, Student-$t$ calibration best captures the empirical residual distribution, and uncertainty-based pruning removes unreliable keypoints. In vision-based aircraft landing, calibrated predictive distributions over runway keypoints support uncertainty-aware position estimation and downstream sensor fusion.