SSA Net: Small Scale-Aware Enhancement Network for Human Pose Estimation

In the field of human pose estimation, heatmap-based methods have emerged as the dominant approach, and numerous studies have achieved remarkable performance based on this technique. However, the inherent drawbacks of heatmaps lead to serious performance degradation in methods based on heatmaps for smaller-scale persons. While some researchers have attempted to tackle this issue by improving the performance of small-scale persons, their efforts have been hampered by the continued reliance on heatmap-based methods. To address this issue, this paper proposes the SSA Net, which aims to enhance the detection accuracy of small-scale persons as much as possible while maintaining a balanced perception of persons at other scales. SSA Net utilizes HRNetW48 as a feature extractor and leverages the TDAA module to enhance small-scale perception. Furthermore, it abandons heatmap-based methods and instead adopts coordinate vector regression to represent keypoints. Notably, SSA Net achieved an AP of 77.4% on the COCO Validation dataset, which is superior to other heatmap-based methods. Additionally, it achieved highly competitive results on the Tiny Validation and MPII datasets as well.