Papers › ViTPose++: Vision Transformer for Generic Body Pose Estimation

ViTPose++: Vision Transformer for Generic Body Pose Estimation

7 Dec 2022arXiv:2212.04246archive 2025-07-28

Yufei Xu, Jing Zhang, Qiming Zhang, DaCheng Tao

In this paper, we show the surprisingly good properties of plain vision transformers for body pose estimation from various aspects, namely simplicity in model structure, scalability in model size, flexibility in training paradigm, and transferability of knowledge between models, through a simple baseline model dubbed ViTPose. Specifically, ViTPose employs the plain and non-hierarchical vision transformer as an encoder to encode features and a lightweight decoder to decode body keypoints in either a top-down or a bottom-up manner. It can be scaled up from about 20M to 1B parameters by taking advantage of the scalable model capacity and high parallelism of the vision transformer, setting a new Pareto front for throughput and performance. Besides, ViTPose is very flexible regarding the attention type, input resolution, and pre-training and fine-tuning strategy. Based on the flexibility, a novel ViTPose+ model is proposed to deal with heterogeneous body keypoint categories in different types of body pose estimation tasks via knowledge factorization, i.e., adopting task-agnostic and task-specific feed-forward networks in the transformer. We also empirically demonstrate that the knowledge of large ViTPose models can be easily transferred to small ones via a simple knowledge token. Experimental results show that our ViTPose model outperforms representative methods on the challenging MS COCO Human Keypoint Detection benchmark at both top-down and bottom-up settings. Furthermore, our ViTPose+ model achieves state-of-the-art performance simultaneously on a series of body pose estimation tasks, including MS COCO, AI Challenger, OCHuman, MPII for human keypoint detection, COCO-Wholebody for whole-body keypoint detection, as well as AP-10K and APT-36K for animal keypoint detection, without sacrificing inference speed.

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Tasks

2D Human Pose EstimationAnimal Pose EstimationKeypoint DetectionPose Estimation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
2D Human Pose Estimation COCO-WholeBody ViTPose+-H WB 61.2 #8 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
2D Human Pose Estimation COCO-WholeBody ViTPose+-H body 75.9 #8 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
2D Human Pose Estimation COCO-WholeBody ViTPose+-H face 63.3 #8 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
2D Human Pose Estimation COCO-WholeBody ViTPose+-H foot 77.9 #8 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
2D Human Pose Estimation COCO-WholeBody ViTPose+-H hand 54.7 #8 of 15 Archive leaderboard report
Animal Pose Estimation AP-10K ViTPose+-H AP 82.4 #1 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Animal Pose Estimation AP-10K ViTPose+-L AP 80.4 #2 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Animal Pose Estimation AP-10K ViTPose+-B AP 74.5 #5 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Animal Pose Estimation AP-10K HRNet-w48 AP 73.1 #6 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Animal Pose Estimation AP-10K HRNet-w32 AP 72.2 #7 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Animal Pose Estimation AP-10K ViTPose+-S ViT-S AP 71.4 #8 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Animal Pose Estimation AP-10K SimpleBaseline-ResNet50 AP 68.1 #9 of 10 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

AttentionDense ConnectionsLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxVision Transformer

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