Adaptive Hypergraph Neural Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation

This paper proposes a novel two-stage hypergraph-based framework, dubbed ADaptive Hypergraph Neural Network (AD-HNN) to estimate multiple human poses from a single image, with a keypoint localization network and an Adaptive-Pose Hypergraph Neural Network (AP-HNN) added onto the former network. For providing better guided representations of AP-HNN, we employ a Semantic Interaction Convolution (SIC) module within the initial localization network to acquire more explicit predictions. Build upon this, we design a novel adaptive hypergraph to represent a human body for capturing high-order semantic relations among different joints. Notably, it can adaptively adjust the relations between joints and seek the most reasonable structure for the variable poses to benefit the keypoint localization. These two stages are combined to be trained in an end-to-end fashion. Unlike traditional Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) that are based on a fixed tree structure, AP-HNN can deal with ambiguity in human pose estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that the AD-HNN achieves state-of-the-art performance both on the MS-COCO, MPII and CrowdPose datasets.