RepNet: A Lightweight Human Pose Regression Network Based on Re-Parameterization

Abstract

Human pose estimation, as the basis of advanced computer vision, has a wide application perspective. In existing studies, the high-capacity model based on the heatmap method can achieve accurate recognition results, but it encounters many difficulties when used in real-world scenarios. To solve this problem, we propose a lightweight pose regression algorithm (RepNet) that introduces a multi-parameter network structure, fuses multi-level features, and combines the idea of residual likelihood estimation. A well-designed convolutional architecture is used for training. By reconstructing the parameters of each level, the network model is simplified, and the computation time and efficiency of the detection task are optimized. The prediction performance is also improved by the output of the maximum likelihood model and the reversible transformation of the underlying distribution learned by the flow generation model. RepNet achieves a recognition accuracy of 66.1 AP on the COCO dataset, at a computational speed of 15 ms on GPU and 40 ms on CPU. This resolves the contradiction between prediction accuracy and computational complexity and contributes to research in lightweight pose estimation.

Keywords

• human pose regression
• re-parameterized structure
• multi-scale fusion
• residual log-likelihood estimation