Papers › Lite Pose: Efficient Architecture Design for 2D Human Pose Estimation

Lite Pose: Efficient Architecture Design for 2D Human Pose Estimation

3 May 2022CVPR 2022 1arXiv:2205.01271archive 2025-07-28

Yihan Wang, Muyang Li, Han Cai, Wei-Ming Chen, Song Han

Pose estimation plays a critical role in human-centered vision applications. However, it is difficult to deploy state-of-the-art HRNet-based pose estimation models on resource-constrained edge devices due to the high computational cost (more than 150 GMACs per frame). In this paper, we study efficient architecture design for real-time multi-person pose estimation on edge. We reveal that HRNet's high-resolution branches are redundant for models at the low-computation region via our gradual shrinking experiments. Removing them improves both efficiency and performance. Inspired by this finding, we design LitePose, an efficient single-branch architecture for pose estimation, and introduce two simple approaches to enhance the capacity of LitePose, including Fusion Deconv Head and Large Kernel Convs. Fusion Deconv Head removes the redundancy in high-resolution branches, allowing scale-aware feature fusion with low overhead. Large Kernel Convs significantly improve the model's capacity and receptive field while maintaining a low computational cost. With only 25% computation increment, 7x7 kernels achieve +14.0 mAP better than 3x3 kernels on the CrowdPose dataset. On mobile platforms, LitePose reduces the latency by up to 5.0x without sacrificing performance, compared with prior state-of-the-art efficient pose estimation models, pushing the frontier of real-time multi-person pose estimation on edge. Our code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/litepose.

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MBConvBlock mit-han-lab/litepose/lib/models/pose_efficient_hrnet.py official repository ran · metamorphic tier: invariant fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · e966f3ae5dde908b · report
SqueezeExcitation mit-han-lab/litepose/lib/models/pose_efficient_hrnet.py official repository ran · metamorphic tier: invariant fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 3db41efdd2ac6db6 · report
Swish mit-han-lab/litepose/lib/models/pose_efficient_hrnet.py official repository ran · metamorphic tier: invariant fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 30a91d38f617160e · report
ConvBNReLU mit-han-lab/litepose/lib/models/pose_efficient_hrnet.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · cfa53abbbd2bfd20 · report
PoseHigherResolutionNet mit-han-lab/litepose/lib/models/pose_efficient_hrnet.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · b75192ca4447c219 · report

Tasks

2D Human Pose EstimationMulti-Person Pose EstimationPose Estimation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Multi-Person Pose Estimation COCO (Common Objects in Context) LitePose-S Test AP 56.7 #15 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Multi-Person Pose Estimation COCO (Common Objects in Context) LitePose-S Validation AP 56.8 #15 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Multi-Person Pose Estimation CrowdPose LitePose-S mAP @0.5:0.95 58.3 #24 of 28 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.

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