Distribution-Aware Coordinate Representation for Human Pose Estimation

Understand

While being the de facto standard coordinate representation in human pose estimation, heatmap is never systematically investigated in the literature, to our best knowledge.

• This work fills this gap by studying the coordinate representation with a particular focus on the heatmap.
• Interestingly, we found that the process of decoding the predicted heatmaps into the final joint coordinates in the original image space 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 widely used by existing methods, and propose a more principled distribution-aware decoding method.