Multi-resolution Fusion Network for Human Pose Estimation in Low-resolution Images

2D human pose estimation still faces difficulty in low-resolution images. Most existing top-down approaches scale up the target human bonding box images to the large size and insert the scaled image into the network. Due to up-sampling, artifacts occur in the low-resolution target images, and the degraded images adversely affect the accurate estimation of the joint positions. To address this issue, we propose a multi-resolution input feature fusion network for human pose estimation. Specifically, the bounding box image of the target human is rescaled to multiple input images of various sizes, and the features extracted from the multiple images are fused in the network. Moreover, we introduce a guiding channel which induces the multi-resolution input features to alternatively affect the network according to the resolution of the target image. We conduct experiments on MS COCO dataset which is a representative dataset for 2D human pose estimation, where our method achieves superior performance compared to the strong baseline HRNet and the previous state-of-the-art methods. Keywords: Human keypoint detection, Human pose estimation, Low-resolution image, Small person pose estimation, 2D pose estimation