Lightweight Human Pose Estimation Based on Multi-Attention Mechanism

Human pose estimation has received much attention from the research community because of its wide range of applications. However, current research for pose estimation is usually complex and computationally intensive, especially the feature loss problems in the feature fusion process. To address the above problems, we propose a lightweight human pose estimation network based on multi-attention mechanism (LMANet). In our method, network parameters can be significantly reduced by lightweighting the bottleneck blocks with depth-wise separable convolution on the high-resolution networks. After that, we also introduce a multi-attention mechanism to improve the model prediction accuracy, and the channel attention module is added in the initial stage of the network to enhance the local cross-channel information interaction. More importantly, we inject spatial cross-awareness module in the multi-scale feature fusion stage to reduce the spatial information loss during feature extraction. Extensive experiments on COCO2017 dataset and MPII dataset show that LMANet can guarantee a higher prediction accuracy with fewer network parameters and computational effort. Compared with the high-resolution network HRNet, the number of parameters and the computational complexity of the network are reduced by 67% and 73%, respectively.