# 2D Human Pose Estimation with Explicit Anatomical Keypoints Structure Constraints

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.02163 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02163/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [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)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4659/) (2013)
- [Auto-DeepLab: Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02985/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Towards Accurate Multi-person Pose Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01779/) (2017)
- [Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation Via Disentangled Keypoint Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02300/) (2021)
- [Lite-HRNet: A Lightweight High-Resolution Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06403/) (2021)
- [Rethinking the Heatmap Regression for Bottom-up Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15175/) (2020)
- [Point-Set Anchors for Object Detection, Instance Segmentation and Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02846/) (2020)
- [Differentiable Hierarchical Graph Grouping for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11864/) (2020)
- [Deep Dual Consecutive Network for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07254/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Structure-Aware Network for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09894/) (2018)
- [Instance-sensitive Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08678/) (2016)
- [FCPose: Fully Convolutional Multi-Person Pose Estimation with Dynamic Instance-Aware Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14185/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Kernel Distillation for Efficient Pose Estimation in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09216/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [OpenCapBench: A Benchmark to Bridge Pose Estimation and Biomechanics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09788/) (2024)
- [SEPose: A Synthetic Event-based Human Pose Estimation Dataset for Pedestrian Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11910/) (2025)
- [A Coarse-to-Fine Human Pose Estimation Method based on Two-stage Distillation and Progressive Graph Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11212/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, human pose estimation mainly focuses on how to design a more effective and better deep network structure as human features extractor, and most designed feature extraction networks only introduce the position of each anatomical keypoint to guide their training process. However, we found that some human anatomical keypoints kept their topology invariance, which can help to localize them more accurately when detecting the keypoints on the feature map. But to the best of our knowledge, there is no literature that has specifically studied it. Thus, in this paper, we present a novel 2D human pose estimation method with explicit anatomical keypoints structure constraints, which introduces the topology constraint term that consisting of the differences between the distance and direction of the keypoint-to-keypoint and their groundtruth in the loss object. More importantly, our proposed model can be plugged in the most existing bottom-up or top-down human pose estimation methods and improve their performance. The extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset: COCO keypoint dataset, show that our methods perform favorably against the most existing bottom-up and top-down human pose estimation methods, especially for Lite-HRNet, when our model is plugged into it, its AP scores separately raise by 2.9% and 3.3% on COCO val2017 and test-dev2017 datasets.