Pose Magic: Efficient and Temporally Consistent Human Pose Estimation with a Hybrid Mamba-GCN Network

Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in 3D Human Pose Estimation (HPE) are primarily based on Transformers. However, existing Transformer-based 3D HPE backbones often encounter a trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency. To resolve the above dilemma, in this work, we leverage recent advances in state space models and utilize Mamba for high-quality and efficient long-range modeling. Nonetheless, Mamba still faces challenges in precisely exploiting local dependencies between joints. To address these issues, we propose a new attention-free hybrid spatiotemporal architecture named Hybrid Mamba-GCN (Pose Magic). This architecture introduces local enhancement with GCN by capturing relationships between neighboring joints, thus producing new representations to complement Mamba's outputs. By adaptively fusing representations from Mamba and GCN, Pose Magic demonstrates superior capability in learning the underlying 3D structure. To meet the requirements of real-time inference, we also provide a fully causal version. Extensive experiments show that Pose Magic achieves new SOTA results (downarrow 0.9 mm) while saving 74.1% FLOPs. In addition, Pose Magic exhibits optimal motion consistency and the ability to generalize to unseen sequence lengths.