Bi-Directional Message Passing Based Scanet For Human Pose Estimation

Articulated human pose estimation is one of the fundamental computer vision problems. In this paper, a Bi-directional Message Passing(BDMP) module is proposed to fuse convolutional features of different scales in the up-sampling process of the hourglass model for human pose estimation. Moreover, a novel module which integrates Spatial and Channelwise Attention Network(SCANet) is proposed to refine the features obtained from the message passing stage. We design a Semantics-aware Channel-wise Attention(SACWA) module to reduce the feature redundancy and enrich the semantic information simultaneously. A Sharper Spatial Attention(SSA) module based on the Gumbel-Softmax sampling is proposed to exclude the interference from cluttered background and overcomes the gradient degradation induced by the softmax normalization. The proposed framework achieves leading position on MPII benchmark against the state-of-the-arts methods with much less parameters.