Papers › Poseur: Direct Human Pose Regression with Transformers

Poseur: Direct Human Pose Regression with Transformers

19 Jan 2022arXiv:2201.07412archive 2025-07-28

Weian Mao, Yongtao Ge, Chunhua Shen, Zhi Tian, Xinlong Wang, Zhibin Wang, Anton Van Den Hengel

We propose a direct, regression-based approach to 2D human pose estimation from single images. We formulate the problem as a sequence prediction task, which we solve using a Transformer network. This network directly learns a regression mapping from images to the keypoint coordinates, without resorting to intermediate representations such as heatmaps. This approach avoids much of the complexity associated with heatmap-based approaches. To overcome the feature misalignment issues of previous regression-based methods, we propose an attention mechanism that adaptively attends to the features that are most relevant to the target keypoints, considerably improving the accuracy. Importantly, our framework is end-to-end differentiable, and naturally learns to exploit the dependencies between keypoints. Experiments on MS-COCO and MPII, two predominant pose-estimation datasets, demonstrate that our method significantly improves upon the state-of-the-art in regression-based pose estimation. More notably, ours is the first regression-based approach to perform favorably compared to the best heatmap-based pose estimation methods.

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Code

aim-uofa/poseur officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report

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Tasks

2D Human Pose EstimationKeypoint DetectionPose Estimationregression

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Keypoint Detection COCO (Common Objects in Context) Poseur(384x288) Test AP 78.3 #2 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Keypoint Detection COCO (Common Objects in Context) Poseur(384x288) Validation AP 79.6 #2 of 24 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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