Differentially Private 2D Human Pose Estimation

Abstract: Human pose estimation (HPE) has become essential in numerous applications including healthcare, activity recognition, and human-computer interaction. However, the privacy implications of processing sensitive visual data present significant deployment barriers in critical domains. While traditional anonymization techniques offer limited protection and often compromise data utility for broader motion analysis, Differential Privacy (DP) provides formal privacy guarantees but typically degrades model performance when applied naively. In this work, we present the first differentially private 2D human pose estimation (2D-HPE) by applying Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) to this task. To effectively balance privacy with performance, we adopt Projected DP-SGD (PDP-SGD), which projects the noisy gradients to a low-dimensional subspace. Additionally, we adapt TinyViT, a compact and efficient vision transformer for coordinate classification in HPE, providing a lightweight yet powerful backbone that enhances privacy-preserving deployment feasibility on resource-limited devices. Our approach is particularly valuable for multimedia interpretation tasks, enabling privacy-safe analysis and understanding of human motion across diverse visual media while preserving the semantic meaning required for downstream applications. Comprehensive experiments on the MPII Human Pose Dataset demonstrate significant performance enhancement with PDP-SGD achieving 78.48% [email protected] at a strict privacy budget ($\epsilon=0.2$), compared to 63.85% for standard DP-SGD. This work lays foundation for privacy-preserving human pose estimation in real-world, sensitive applications.