Lightweight Super-Resolution Head for Human Pose Estimation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight super-resolution head for human pose estimation that reduces quantization errors by predicting high-resolution heatmaps, improving accuracy without complex post-processing.

Contribution

It reformulates heatmap prediction as a super-resolution task, enabling high-resolution heatmaps with minimal additional complexity, applicable to various pose estimation frameworks.

Findings

Outperforms existing heatmap-based methods on COCO, MPII, and CrowdPose datasets.

Effectively reduces quantization errors without heavy post-processing.

Lightweight SR head is versatile for top-down and bottom-up methods.

Abstract

Heatmap-based methods have become the mainstream method for pose estimation due to their superior performance. However, heatmap-based approaches suffer from significant quantization errors with downscale heatmaps, which result in limited performance and the detrimental effects of intermediate supervision. Previous heatmap-based methods relied heavily on additional post-processing to mitigate quantization errors. Some heatmap-based approaches improve the resolution of feature maps by using multiple costly upsampling layers to improve localization precision. To solve the above issues, we creatively view the backbone network as a degradation process and thus reformulate the heatmap prediction as a Super-Resolution (SR) task. We first propose the SR head, which predicts heatmaps with a spatial resolution higher than the input feature maps (or even consistent with the input image) by super-resolution, to effectively reduce the quantization error and the dependence on further post-processing. Besides, we propose SRPose to gradually recover the HR heatmaps from LR heatmaps and degraded features in a coarse-to-fine manner. To reduce the training difficulty of HR heatmaps, SRPose applies SR heads to supervise the intermediate features in each stage. In addition, the SR head is a lightweight and generic head that applies to top-down and bottom-up methods. Extensive experiments on the COCO, MPII, and CrowdPose datasets show that SRPose outperforms the corresponding heatmap-based approaches. The code and models are available at https://github.com/haonanwang0522/SRPose.