Joint COCO and Mapillary Workshop at ICCV 2019 Keypoint Detection Challenge Track Technical Report: Distribution-Aware Coordinate Representation for Human Pose Estimation

TL;DR

This paper introduces DARK, a distribution-aware coordinate representation method that improves human pose estimation by optimizing coordinate decoding and encoding processes, leading to state-of-the-art results on COCO.

Contribution

It systematically investigates coordinate decoding in heatmap-based pose estimation and proposes a novel distribution-aware approach that enhances model accuracy.

Findings

DARK significantly improves pose estimation accuracy across multiple models.

The proposed method achieves top results on the COCO keypoint detection challenge.

Distribution-aware decoding and encoding are crucial for unbiased and precise keypoint localization.

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the coordinate representation in human pose estimation. While being the standard choice, heatmap based representation has not been systematically investigated. We found that the process of coordinate decoding (i.e. transforming the predicted heatmaps to the coordinates) is surprisingly significant for human pose estimation performance, which nevertheless was not recognised before. In light of the discovered importance, we further probe the design limitations of the standard coordinate decoding method and propose a principled distribution-aware decoding method. Meanwhile, we improve the standard coordinate encoding process (i.e. transforming ground-truth coordinates to heatmaps) by generating accurate heatmap distributions for unbiased model training. Taking them together, we formulate a novel Distribution-Aware coordinate Representation for Keypoint (DARK) method. Serving as a model-agnostic plug-in, DARK significantly improves the performance of a variety of state-of-the-art human pose estimation models. Extensive experiments show that DARK yields the best results on COCO keypoint detection challenge, validating the usefulness and effectiveness of our novel coordinate representation idea. The project page containing more details is at https://ilovepose.github.io/coco