Joint-Motion Mutual Learning for Pose Estimation in Video

Human pose estimation in videos has long been a compelling yet challenging task within the realm of computer vision. Nevertheless, this task remains difficult because of the complex video scenes, such as video defocus and self-occlusion. Recent methods strive to integrate multi-frame visual features generated by a backbone network for pose estimation. However, they often ignore the useful joint information encoded in the initial heatmap, which is a byproduct of the backbone generation. Comparatively, methods that attempt to refine the initial heatmap fail to consider any spatiotemporal motion features. As a result, the performance of existing methods for pose estimation falls short due to the lack of ability to leverage both local joint (heatmap) information and global motion (feature) dynamics.

To address this problem, we propose a novel joint-motion mutual learning framework for pose estimation, which effectively concentrates on both local joint dependency and global pixel-level motion dynamics. Specifically, we introduce a context-aware joint learner that adaptively leverages initial heatmaps and motion flow to retrieve robust local joint feature. Given that local joint feature