Improving Robustness for Pose Estimation via Stable Heatmap Regression

Abstract: Deep learning methods have achieved excellent performance in pose estimation, but the lack of robustness causes the keypoints to change drastically between similar images. In view of this problem, a stable heatmap regression method is proposed to alleviate network vulnerability to small perturbations. We utilize the correlation between different rows and columns in a heatmap to alleviate the multi-peaks problem, and design a highly differentiated heatmap regression to make a keypoint discriminative from surrounding points. A maximum stability training loss is used to simplify the optimization difficulty when minimizing the prediction gap of two similar images. The proposed method achieves a significant advance in robustness over state-of-the-art approaches on two benchmark datasets and maintains high performance.