Self-supervised Keypoint Correspondences for Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Videos

Video annotation is expensive and time consuming. Consequently, datasets for multi-person pose estimation and tracking are less diverse and have more sparse annotations compared to large scale image datasets for human pose estimation. This makes it challenging to learn deep learning based models for associating keypoints across frames that are robust to nuisance factors such as motion blur and occlusions for the task of multi-person pose tracking. To address this issue, we propose an approach that relies on keypoint correspondences for associating persons in videos. Instead of training the network for estimating keypoint correspondences on video data, it is trained on a large scale image datasets for human pose estimation using self-supervision. Combined with a top-down framework for human pose estimation, we use keypoints correspondences to (i) recover missed pose detections (ii) associate pose detections across video frames. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results for multi-frame pose estimation and multi-person pose tracking on the PosTrack 2017 and PoseTrack 2018 data sets.