Human pose estimation is a fundamental yet challenging task in computer vision. However, difficult scenarios such as invisible keypoints, occlusions and small-scale persons are still not well-handed. In this paper, we present a novel pose estimation framework named UformPose which targets to relieve these issues. UformPose has two core designs: Shared Feature Pyramid Stem (SFPS) and U-shaped hierarchical Multi-scale Keypoint-aware Attention Module (U-MKAM). SFPS is a feature pyramid stem with shared mechanism to learn stronger low-level features at the initial stage, and the shared mechanism can facilitate cross-resolution commonality learning. Our U-MKAM attempts to generate high-quality high-resolution representations by integrating all levels of feature representation of the backbone layer by layer. More importantly, we utilize the flexibility of attention operations for keypoint-aware modeling, which explicitly captures and trades-offs the dependencies between keypoints. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework through the competitive pose estimation results on the COCO dataset. Extensive experiments and visual analysis on CrowdPose demonstrate the robustness of our model in crowd scenes.

We propose an effective method to boost the accuracy of multi-person pose estimation in images. Initially, the three-layer fractal network was constructed to regress multi-person joints location heatmap that can help to enhance an image region with receptive field and capture more joints local-contextual feature information, thereby producing keypoints heatmap intermediate prediction to optimize human body joints regression results. Subsequently, the hierarchical bi-directional inference algorithm was proposed to calculate the degree of relatedness (call it Kinship) for adjacent joints, and it combines the Kinship between adjacent joints with the spatial constraints, which we refer to as joints kinship pattern matching mechanism, to determine the best matched joints pair. We iterate the above-mentioned joints matching process layer by layer until all joints are assigned to a corresponding individual. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes and achieves about 1% and 0.6% increase in mAP on MPII multi-person subset and MSCOCO 2016 keypoints challenge.