Fast and Lightweight Human Pose Estimation

Although achieving significant improvement on pose estimation, the major drawback is that most top-performing methods tend to adopt complex architecture and spend large computational cost to achieve higher performance. Due to the edge device’s limited resources, its top-performing methods are hard to maintain fast inference speed in practice. To address this issue, we proposed the fast and lightweight human pose estimation method to maintain high performance and bear the less computational cost. Especially, the proposed method consists of two parts, i.e., the fast and lightweight pose network (FLPN) for pose estimation and a novel lightweight bottleneck block for reducing computational cost, which can integrate the simple network and lightweight bottleneck into an efficient method for accurate pose estimation. In terms of lightweight bottleneck block, we introduce the structural similarity measurement (SSIM) to refine the appropriate ratio of intrinsic feature maps and reduce the model size. Furthermore, an attention mechanism is also adopted in our lightweight bottleneck block for modeling the contextual information. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method with extensive experiments on the two standard benchmark datasets by comparing our method with state-of-the-art methods. On the COCO keypoint detection dataset, our proposed method attains a similar accuracy with these state-of-the-art methods, but the computational cost of these top-performing methods is more than 7 times that of ours.