2D Human Pose Estimation: A Survey

Human pose estimation aims at localizing human anatomical keypoints or body parts in the input data (e.g., images, videos, or signals). It forms a crucial component in enabling machines to have an insightful understanding of the behaviors of humans, and has become a salient problem in computer vision and related fields. Deep learning techniques allow learning feature representations directly from the data, significantly pushing the performance boundary of human pose estimation. In this paper, we reap the recent achievements of 2D human pose estimation methods and present a comprehensive survey. Briefly, existing approaches put their efforts in three directions, namely network architecture design, network training refinement, and post processing. Network architecture design looks at the architecture of human pose estimation models, extracting more robust features for keypoint recognition and localization. Network training refinement tap into the training of neural networks and aims to improve the representational ability of models. Post processing further incorporates model-agnostic polishing strategies to improve the performance of keypoint detection. More than 200 research contributions are involved in this survey, covering methodological frameworks, common benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and performance comparisons. We seek to provide researchers with a more comprehensive and systematic review on human pose estimation, allowing them to acquire a grand panorama and better identify future directions.