# ZoomNAS: Searching for Whole-body Human Pose Estimation in the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.11547 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11547/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 88 of its 144 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 88)

- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [Regularized Evolution for Image Classifier Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01548/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Once-for-All: Train One Network and Specialize it for Efficient Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09791/) (2019)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [ProxylessNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search on Target Task and Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00332/) (2018)
- [DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00434/) (2018)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [Progressive Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00559/) (2017)
- [FBNet: Hardware-Aware Efficient ConvNet Design via Differentiable Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03443/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4659/) (2013)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)
- [Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00818/) (2023)
- [RTMPose: Real-Time Multi-Person Pose Estimation based on MMPose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07399/) (2023)
- [Neural Localizer Fields for Continuous 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07532/) (2024)
- [RTMW: Real-Time Multi-Person 2D and 3D Whole-body Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08634/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Keypoints from Pretrained Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00065/) (2023)
- [MotionBank: A Large-scale Video Motion Benchmark with Disentangled Rule-based Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13790/) (2024)
- [TCFormer: Visual Recognition via Token Clustering Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11321/) (2024)
- [You Only Learn One Query: Learning Unified Human Query for Single-Stage Multi-Person Multi-Task Human-Centric Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05525/) (2023)
- [GTPT: Group-based Token Pruning Transformer for Efficient Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10756/) (2024)
- [Motion Capture from Inertial and Vision Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16341/) (2024)
- [UniFS: Universal Few-shot Instance Perception with Point Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19401/) (2024)
- [KPM-Bench: A Kinematic Parsing Motion Benchmark for Fine-grained Motion-centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17768/) (2026)
- [PAFUSE: Part-based Diffusion for 3D Whole-Body Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10220/) (2024)
- [CIGPose: Causal Intervention Graph Neural Network for Whole-Body Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09418/) (2026)
- [Automated Patient Positioning with Learned 3D Hand Gestures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14903/) (2024)
- [Y-MAP-Net: Real-time depth, normals, segmentation, multi-label captioning and 2D human pose in RGB images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10334/) (2024)
- [Two-Stream Spatial-Temporal Transformer Framework for Person Identification via Natural Conversational Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20803/) (2025)
- [AI-Based Stroke Rehabilitation Domiciliary Assessment System with ST_GCN Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00049/) (2025)
- [Gesture Matters: Pedestrian Gesture Recognition for AVs Through Skeleton Pose Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08479/) (2026)
- [Improving 3D Foot Motion Reconstruction in Markerless Monocular Human Motion Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09681/) (2026)
- [Monocular Models are Strong Learners for Multi-View Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20391/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper investigates the task of 2D whole-body human pose estimation, which aims to localize dense landmarks on the entire human body including body, feet, face, and hands. We propose a single-network approach, termed ZoomNet, to take into account the hierarchical structure of the full human body and solve the scale variation of different body parts. We further propose a neural architecture search framework, termed ZoomNAS, to promote both the accuracy and efficiency of whole-body pose estimation. ZoomNAS jointly searches the model architecture and the connections between different sub-modules, and automatically allocates computational complexity for searched sub-modules. To train and evaluate ZoomNAS, we introduce the first large-scale 2D human whole-body dataset, namely COCO-WholeBody V1.0, which annotates 133 keypoints for in-the-wild images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ZoomNAS and the significance of COCO-WholeBody V1.0.