# IMPose: Interactive Multi-person Pose Estimation with Dynamic Correction Propagation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04480 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04480/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2026.

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

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07402/) (2017)
- [HOTA: A Higher Order Metric for Evaluating Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07736/) (2020)
- [Rescaling Egocentric Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.13256/) (2020)
- [FairMOT: On the Fairness of Detection and Re-Identification in Multiple Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01888/) (2020)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [3D human pose estimation in video with temporal convolutions and semi-supervised training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11742/) (2018)
- [BoT-SORT: Robust Associations Multi-Pedestrian Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14651/) (2022)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [Associative Embedding: End-to-End Learning for Joint Detection and Grouping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05424/) (2016)
- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [EPIC-KITCHENS VISOR Benchmark: VIdeo Segmentations and Object Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13064/) (2022)
- [Human Pose Regression with Residual Log-likelihood Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11291/) (2021)
- [PifPaf: Composite Fields for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06593/) (2019)
- [MeMOTR: Long-Term Memory-Augmented Transformer for Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15700/) (2023)
- [Pose Flow: Efficient Online Pose Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00977/) (2018)
- [Multiple Object Tracking as ID Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16848/) (2024)
- [Detect-and-Track: Efficient Pose Estimation in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09184/) (2017)
- [PoseFix: Model-agnostic General Human Pose Refinement Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03595/) (2018)
- [PoseTrack: Joint Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07727/) (2016)
- [Poseur: Direct Human Pose Regression with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07412/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Gap Between End-to-end and Non-End-to-end Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12724/) (2023)
- [Neural Interactive Keypoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10174/) (2023)
- [Video-Based Human Pose Regression via Decoupled Space-Time Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19926/) (2024)
- [Causal-Inspired Multitask Learning for Video-Based Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14356/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High-quality dynamic human pose annotation equips AI with precise motion kinematics to enable human behavior mastery, yet remains labor-intensive and time-consuming. Current annotation tools either lack temporal correction propagation or fail in multi-person scenarios, necessitating excessive manual intervention. In this paper, we introduce IMPose, an interactive tool for multi-person dynamic pose annotation. It features a dual-level tracking mechanism that propagates one-frame multi-person pose corrections from annotators across entire videos. The keypoint-level ensures corrections temporal propagation via sequential modeling, while the instance-level employs keypoint-aware embedding with relative positional encoding to maintain multi-person cross-frame consistency. To further improve robustness, IMPose maintains historical pose and instance cues in a trajectory bank, which enhances long-range temporal association and stabilizes annotation in challenging cases such as occlusion and motion blur. By converting sparse human corrections into dense and coherent pose trajectories, our framework significantly reduces repeated manual refinement across frames. Extensive experiments show that IMPose consistently achieves a strong accuracy efficiency trade off under different interaction budgets, demonstrating particular advantages in low click annotation settings. IMPose achieves high precision annotation with high efficiency, requiring only 27 clicks per 1,050 frame video on 3DPW and 3 clicks per tracklet per 84-frame on PoseTrack21. We further expand PoseTrack21 with 188K pose instances (3.55M keypoints) at a minimal cost of 10 annotators in 10 hours. The annotation tool, codes, and extended dataset will be open-sourced.
