DNANet: De-Normalized Attention Based Multi-Resolution Network for Human Pose Estimation

Recently, multi-resolution networks (such as Hourglass, CPN, HRNet, etc.) have achieved significant performance on the task of human pose estimation by combining features from various resolutions. In this paper, we propose a novel type of attention module, namely De-Normalized Attention (DNA) to deal with the feature attenuations of conventional attention modules. Our method extends the original HRNet with spatial, channel-wise and resolution-wise DNAs, which aims at evaluating the importance of features from different locations, channels and resolutions to enhance the network capability for feature representation. We also propose to add fine-to-coarse connections across high-to-low resolutions in-side each layer of HRNet to increase the maximum depth of network topology. In addition, we propose to modify the keypoint regressor at the end of HRNet for accurate keypoint heatmap prediction. The effectiveness of our proposed network is demonstrated on COCO keypoint detection dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance at 77.6 AP score on COCO val2017 dataset without using extra keypoint training data. Our paper will be accompanied with publicly available codes at GitHub.