Efficient and Adaptive Human Pose Estimation on Resource-Constrained Computing Devices via Knowledge Distillation and Temporal Propagation

Existing video-based human pose estimation (HPE) methods commonly rely on large networks to localize body joints across all frames, achieving remarkable accuracy but imposing high memory and computational demands that limit their applications on resource-constrained devices. Moreover, most models lack the capability to accommodate dynamic changes in available resources, which can negatively impact the performance of parallel tasks. To address these issues, this article proposes a novel yet effective framework for efficient and adaptive HPE on resource-constrained devices. Specifically, the proposed approach adopts the knowledge distillation (KD) strategy to train a light-weight pose estimator network, which is capable of executing rapidly with low computational cost. To further increase the overall efficiency, it exploits the temporal coherence between successive video frames and explicitly propagates body joints from previous frames rather than naively extracting them using a pose estimator. Furthermore, a prediction-based mechanism is adopted to facilitate adaptive key-frame selection, dynamically determining the optimal number of keyframes, thus enhancing the overall efficiency and adaptability. Experiments on Penn Action, Sub-JHMDB, and real-world systems demonstrate that the proposed method achieves comparative accuracy, superior efficiency, and robust flexibility in dynamic scenarios.