# LightTrack: A Generic Framework for Online Top-Down Human Pose Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02822 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02822/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [Do Different Tracking Tasks Require Different Appearance Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02156/) (2021)
- [OpenPifPaf: Composite Fields for Semantic Keypoint Detection and Spatio-Temporal Association](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02440/) (2021)
- [Conditional Directed Graph Convolution for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07797/) (2021)
- [Recent Advances in Monocular 2D and 3D Human Pose Estimation: A Deep Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11536/) (2021)
- [TAPTR: Tracking Any Point with Transformers as Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13042/) (2024)
- [VoxelTrack: Multi-Person 3D Human Pose Estimation and Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02452/) (2021)
- [ViPNAS: Efficient Video Pose Estimation via Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10154/) (2021)
- [Learning to Track Instances without Video Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00287/) (2021)
- [TrouSPI-Net: Spatio-temporal attention on parallel atrous convolutions and U-GRUs for skeletal pedestrian crossing prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00953/) (2021)
- [Multi-Person 3D Pose and Shape Estimation via Inverse Kinematics and Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13529/) (2022)
- [Human Pose-based Estimation, Tracking and Action Recognition with Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13039/) (2023)
- [BAPose: Bottom-Up Pose Estimation with Disentangled Waterfall Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10716/) (2021)
- [Improving Multi-Person Pose Tracking with A Confidence Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18920/) (2023)
- [Temporally Guided Articulated Hand Pose Tracking in Surgical Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04281/) (2021)
- [RefCrowd: Grounding the Target in Crowd with Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08172/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose a novel effective light-weight framework, called LightTrack, for online human pose tracking. The proposed framework is designed to be generic for top-down pose tracking and is faster than existing online and offline methods. Single-person Pose Tracking (SPT) and Visual Object Tracking (VOT) are incorporated into one unified functioning entity, easily implemented by a replaceable single-person pose estimation module. Our framework unifies single-person pose tracking with multi-person identity association and sheds first light upon bridging keypoint tracking with object tracking. We also propose a Siamese Graph Convolution Network (SGCN) for human pose matching as a Re-ID module in our pose tracking system. In contrary to other Re-ID modules, we use a graphical representation of human joints for matching. The skeleton-based representation effectively captures human pose similarity and is computationally inexpensive. It is robust to sudden camera shift that introduces human drifting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to propose an online human pose tracking framework in a top-down fashion. The proposed framework is general enough to fit other pose estimators and candidate matching mechanisms. Our method outperforms other online methods while maintaining a much higher frame rate, and is very competitive with our offline state-of-the-art. We make the code publicly available at: https://github.com/Guanghan/lighttrack.