# Towards Simple and Accurate Human Pose Estimation with Stair Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.09115 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09115/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [Selective Kernel Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06586/) (2019)
- [A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03098/) (2017)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [RMPE: Regional Multi-person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00137/) (2016)
- [Convolutional Pose Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00134/) (2016)
- [High Frequency Component Helps Explain the Generalization of Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13545/) (2019)
- [DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4659/) (2013)
- [Integral Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08229/) (2017)
- [HigherHRNet: Scale-Aware Representation Learning for Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10357/) (2019)
- [Associative Embedding: End-to-End Learning for Joint Detection and Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05424/) (2016)
- [Distribution-Aware Coordinate Representation for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06278/) (2019)
- [PersonLab: Person Pose Estimation and Instance Segmentation with a Bottom-Up, Part-Based, Geometric Embedding Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08225/) (2018)
- [Towards Accurate Multi-person Pose Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01779/) (2017)
- [Joint Training of a Convolutional Network and a Graphical Model for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2984/) (2014)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we focus on tackling the precise keypoint coordinates regression task. Most existing approaches adopt complicated networks with a large number of parameters, leading to a heavy model with poor cost-effectiveness in practice. To overcome this limitation, we develop a small yet discrimicative model called STair Network, which can be simply stacked towards an accurate multi-stage pose estimation system. Specifically, to reduce computational cost, STair Network is composed of novel basic feature extraction blocks which focus on promoting feature diversity and obtaining rich local representations with fewer parameters, enabling a satisfactory balance on efficiency and performance. To further improve the performance, we introduce two mechanisms with negligible computational cost, focusing on feature fusion and replenish. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the STair Network on two standard datasets, e.g., 1-stage STair Network achieves a higher accuracy than HRNet by 5.5% on COCO test dataset with 80% fewer parameters and 68% fewer GFLOPs.