We propose UniPose+, a unified framework for 2D and 3D human pose estimation in images and videos. The UniPose+ architecture leverages multi-scale feature representations to increase the effectiveness of backbone feature extractors, with no significant increase in network size and no postprocessing. Current pose estimation methods heavily rely on statistical postprocessing or predefined anchor poses for joint localization. The UniPose+ framework incorporates contextual information across scales and joint localization with Gaussian heatmap modulation at the decoder output to estimate 2D and 3D human pose in a single stage with state-of-the-art accuracy, without relying on predefined anchor poses. The multi-scale representations allowed by the waterfall module in the UniPose+ framework leverage the efficiency of progressive filtering in the cascade architecture, while maintaining multi-scale fields-of-view comparable to spatial pyramid configurations. Our results on multiple datasets demonstrate that UniPose+, with a HRNet, ResNet or SENet backbone and waterfall module, is a robust and efficient architecture for single person 2D and 3D pose estimation in single images and videos.

We propose UniPose, a unified framework for human pose estimation, based on our “Waterfall” Atrous Spatial Pooling architecture, that achieves state-of-art-results on several pose estimation metrics. UniPose incorporates contextual segmentation and joint localization to estimate the human pose in a single stage, with high accuracy, without relying on statistical postprocessing methods. The Waterfall module in UniPose leverages the efficiency of progressive filtering in the cascade architecture, while maintaining multi-scale fields-of-view comparable to spatial pyramid configurations. Additionally, our method is extended to UniPose-LSTM for multi-frame processing and achieves state-of-the-art results for temporal pose estimation in Video. Our results on multiple datasets demonstrate that UniPose, with a ResNet backbone and Waterfall module, is a robust and efficient architecture for pose estimation obtaining state-of-the-art results in single person pose detection for both single images and videos.