Human-centric perception, comprehension, and creation tasks rely on whole-body pose estimation, which includes tasks like 3D whole-body mesh recovery, human-object interaction, and posture-conditioned human image and motion production. To meet the growing demand for virtual content development and VR/AR, algorithms like OpenPose and MediaPipe are commonly used to record human postures. However, these tools still need improvement in performance to reach their full potential. Therefore, advancements in human pose assessment technologies are necessary for user-driven content production.
Whole-body pose estimation is more challenging than human pose estimation with body-only key points detection due to factors like the complex hierarchical structures of the human body, small resolutions of the hand and face, the matching of complex body parts to multiple people, data limitations, and the need to compress models for deployment. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique that can improve the effectiveness of compact models without adding unnecessary costs to the inference process. It allows students to learn from a more experienced teacher.
Researchers from Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School and International Digital Economy Academy have developed a two-stage pose distillation architecture called DWPose. They use the latest pose estimator, RTMPose, trained on COCO-WholeBody, as their base model. In the first stage, they use the teacher’s intermediate layer and final logits to guide the student model. They also use a weight-decay approach to enhance effectiveness. The second stage involves a head-aware self-KD to improve head localization.
To address the limitations of existing datasets, they incorporate an extra UBody dataset that includes comprehensive face and hand key points captured in real-life settings. Their contributions include overcoming whole-body data limitations, introducing a two-stage pose knowledge distillation method, and achieving significant improvements in whole-body pose estimation accuracy.
To learn more about their research and access the paper and GitHub, visit the provided links. Credit goes to the researchers on this project. Don’t forget to join their ML SubReddit, Facebook Community, Discord Channel, and Email Newsletter to stay updated on the latest AI research news and projects. If you’re interested in SQL and predicting the future, check out their sponsored content.
Aneesh Tickoo, a consulting intern at MarktechPost, is passionate about machine learning and image processing. He is currently pursuing his undergraduate degree in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bhilai. Connect with him for collaboration on exciting projects.