Human Pose-Estimation Algorithm Based on Lightweight High-Resolution Network

Abstract

Human pose estimation is widely used in multiple fields, including sports fitness, gesture control, unmanned supermarkets, and entertainment games. However, pose-estimation tasks face several challenges. Considering the current mainstream human pose-estimation networks with large parameters and complex calculations, LitePose, a lightweight pose-estimation network based on a high-resolution network, is proposed. First, Ghost convolution is used to reduce the parameters of the feature extraction network. Second, by using the Decoupled Fully Connected (DFC) attention module, the dependence relationship between pixels in the far distance space position is better captured and the loss in feature extraction due to decrease in parameters is reduced. The accuracy of human pose keypoint regression is improved, and a feature enhancement module is designed to further enhance the features extracted by the backbone network. Finally, a new coordinate decoding method is designed to reduce the error in the heatmap decoding process and improve the accuracy of keypoint regression. LitePose is validated on the human critical point detection datasets COCO and MPII and compared with current mainstream methods. The experimental results show that LitePose loses 0.2% accuracy compared to the baseline network HRNet; however, the number of parameters is less than one-third of the baseline network. LitePose can significantly reduce the number of parameters in the network model while ensuring minimal accuracy loss.