# Keypoints as Dynamic Centroids for Unified Human Pose and Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12130 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12130/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2025.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [YOLACT: Real-time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02689/) (2019)
- [RMPE: Regional Multi-person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00137/) (2016)
- [Convolutional Pose Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00134/) (2016)
- [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)
- [CrowdPose: Efficient Crowded Scenes Pose Estimation and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00324/) (2018)
- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [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)
- [PifPaf: Composite Fields for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06593/) (2019)
- [DeepCut: Joint Subset Partition and Labeling for Multi Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06645/) (2015)
- [Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation Via Disentangled Keypoint Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02300/) (2021)
- [Pose2Seg: Detection Free Human Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10683/) (2018)
- [DeeperCut: A Deeper, Stronger, and Faster Multi-Person Pose Estimation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.03170/) (2016)
- [Single-Stage Multi-Person Pose Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09220/) (2019)
- [Learning Delicate Local Representations for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04030/) (2020)
- [DirectPose: Direct End-to-End Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07451/) (2019)
- [Explicit Box Detection Unifies End-to-End Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01593/) (2023)
- [MultiPoseNet: Fast Multi-Person Pose Estimation using Pose Residual Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04067/) (2018)
- [Instance-sensitive Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08678/) (2016)
- [Multi-Person Pose Estimation with Enhanced Channel-wise and Spatial Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03466/) (2019)
- [FCPose: Fully Convolutional Multi-Person Pose Estimation with Dynamic Instance-Aware Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14185/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The dynamic movement of the human body presents a fundamental challenge for human pose estimation and body segmentation. State-of-the-art approaches primarily rely on combining keypoint heatmaps with segmentation masks but often struggle in scenarios involving overlapping joints or rapidly changing poses during instance-level segmentation. To address these limitations, we propose Keypoints as Dynamic Centroid (KDC), a new centroid-based representation for unified human pose estimation and instance-level segmentation. KDC adopts a bottom-up paradigm to generate keypoint heatmaps for both easily distinguishable and complex keypoints and improves keypoint detection and confidence scores by introducing KeyCentroids using a keypoint disk. It leverages high-confidence keypoints as dynamic centroids in the embedding space to generate MaskCentroids, allowing for swift clustering of pixels to specific human instances during rapid body movements in live environments. Our experimental evaluations on the CrowdPose, OCHuman, and COCO benchmarks demonstrate KDC's effectiveness and generalizability in challenging scenarios in terms of both accuracy and runtime performance. The implementation is available at: https://sites.google.com/view/niazahmad/projects/kdc.