Papers › Differentiable Hierarchical Graph Grouping for Multi-Person Pose Estimation
Differentiable Hierarchical Graph Grouping for Multi-Person Pose Estimation
Sheng Jin, Wentao Liu, Enze Xie, Wenhai Wang, Chen Qian, Wanli Ouyang, Ping Luo
Multi-person pose estimation is challenging because it localizes body keypoints for multiple persons simultaneously. Previous methods can be divided into two streams, i.e. top-down and bottom-up methods. The top-down methods localize keypoints after human detection, while the bottom-up methods localize keypoints directly and then cluster/group them for different persons, which are generally more efficient than top-down methods. However, in existing bottom-up methods, the keypoint grouping is usually solved independently from keypoint detection, making them not end-to-end trainable and have sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we investigate a new perspective of human part grouping and reformulate it as a graph clustering task. Especially, we propose a novel differentiable Hierarchical Graph Grouping (HGG) method to learn the graph grouping in bottom-up multi-person pose estimation task. Moreover, HGG is easily embedded into main-stream bottom-up methods. It takes human keypoint candidates as graph nodes and clusters keypoints in a multi-layer graph neural network model. The modules of HGG can be trained end-to-end with the keypoint detection network and is able to supervise the grouping process in a hierarchical manner. To improve the discrimination of the clustering, we add a set of edge discriminators and macro-node discriminators. Extensive experiments on both COCO and OCHuman datasets demonstrate that the proposed method improves the performance of bottom-up pose estimation methods.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2D Human Pose Estimation | OCHuman | HGG (AE+) | Test AP | 36.0 | #5 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| 2D Human Pose Estimation | OCHuman | HGG (AE+) | Validation AP | 41.8 | #5 of 11 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Keypoint Detection | OCHuman | HGG (AE+) | Test AP | 36.0 | #4 of 10 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Keypoint Detection | OCHuman | HGG (AE+) | Validation AP | 41.8 | #4 of 10 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Pose Estimation | OCHuman | HGG (AE+) | Test AP | 36.0 | #13 of 19 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Pose Estimation | OCHuman | HGG (AE+) | Validation AP | 41.8 | #13 of 19 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
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