Improved TokenPose with Sparsity

Over the past few years, the vision transformer and its various forms have gained significance in human pose estimation. By treating image patches as tokens, transformers can capture global relationships wisely, estimate the keypoint tokens by leveraging the visual tokens, and recognize the posture of the human body. Nevertheless, global attention is computationally demanding, which poses a challenge for scaling up transformer-based methods to high-resolution features. In this paper, we introduce sparsity in both keypoint token attention and visual token attention to improve human pose estimation. Experimental results on the MPII dataset demonstrate that our model has a higher level of accuracy and proved the feasibility of the method, achieving new state-of-the-art results. The idea can also provide references for other transformer-based models.