Self-supervised Siamese keypoint inference network for human pose estimation and tracking

Human pose estimation and tracking are important tasks to help understand human behavior. Currently, human pose estimation and tracking face the challenges of missed detection due to sparse annotation of video datasets and difficulty in associating partially occluded and unoccluded cases of the same person. To address these challenges, we propose a self-supervised learning-based method, which infers the correspondence between keypoints to associate persons in the videos. Specifically, we propose a bounding box recovery module to recover missed detections and a Siamese keypoint inference network to solve the issue of error matching caused by occlusions. The local–global attention module, which is designed in the Siamese keypoint inference network, learns the varying dependence information of human keypoints between frames. To simulate the occlusions, we mask random pixels in the image before pre-training using knowledge distillation to associate the differing occlusions of the same person. Our method achieves better results than state-of-the-art methods for human pose estimation and tracking on the PoseTrack 2018 and PoseTrack 2021 datasets. Code is available at: https://github.com/yhtian2023/SKITrack .