extensionsa/DWPose/mmpose/docs/src/papers/algorithms/simcc.md

SimCC: a Simple Coordinate Classification Perspective for Human Pose Estimation

SimCC (ECCV'2022)

@misc{https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2107.03332,
  title={SimCC: a Simple Coordinate Classification Perspective for Human Pose Estimation},
  author={Li, Yanjie and Yang, Sen and Liu, Peidong and Zhang, Shoukui and Wang, Yunxiao and Wang, Zhicheng and Yang, Wankou and Xia, Shu-Tao},
  year={2021}
}

Abstract

The 2D heatmap-based approaches have dominated Human Pose Estimation (HPE) for years due to high performance. However, the long-standing quantization error problem in the 2D heatmap-based methods leads to several well-known drawbacks: 1) The performance for the low-resolution inputs is limited; 2) To improve the feature map resolution for higher localization precision, multiple costly upsampling layers are required; 3) Extra post-processing is adopted to reduce the quantization error. To address these issues, we aim to explore a brand new scheme, called \textit{SimCC}, which reformulates HPE as two classification tasks for horizontal and vertical coordinates. The proposed SimCC uniformly divides each pixel into several bins, thus achieving \emph{sub-pixel} localization precision and low quantization error. Benefiting from that, SimCC can omit additional refinement post-processing and exclude upsampling layers under certain settings, resulting in a more simple and effective pipeline for HPE. Extensive experiments conducted over COCO, CrowdPose, and MPII datasets show that SimCC outperforms heatmap-based counterparts, especially in low-resolution settings by a large margin.