PoseBH: Prototypical Multi-Dataset Training Beyond Human Pose Estimation

We study multi-dataset training (MDT) for pose estimation, where skeletal heterogeneity presents a unique challenge that existing methods have yet to address. In traditional domains, \eg regression and classification, MDT typically relies on dataset merging or multi-head supervision. However, the diversity of skeleton types and limited cross-dataset supervision complicate integration in pose estimation. To address these challenges, we introduce PoseBH, a new MDT framework that tackles keypoint heterogeneity and limited supervision through two key techniques. First, we propose nonparametric keypoint prototypes that learn within a unified embedding space, enabling seamless integration across skeleton types. Second, we develop a cross-type self-supervision mechanism that aligns keypoint predictions with keypoint embedding prototypes, providing supervision without relying on teacher-student models or additional augmentations. PoseBH substantially improves generalization across whole-body and animal pose datasets, including COCO-WholeBody, AP-10K, and APT-36K, while preserving performance on standard human pose benchmarks (COCO, MPII, and AIC). Furthermore, our learned keypoint embeddings transfer effectively to hand shape estimation (InterHand2.6M) and human body shape estimation (3DPW). The code for PoseBH is available at: https://github.com/uyoung-jeong/PoseBH.

BoIR: Box-Supervised Instance Representation for Multi-Person Pose Estimation

Single-stage multi-person human pose estimation (MPPE) methods have shown great performance improvements, but existing methods fail to disentangle features by individual instances under crowded scenes. In this paper, we propose a bounding box-level instance representation learning called BoIR, which simultaneously solves instance detection, instance disentanglement, and instance-keypoint association problems. Our new instance embedding loss provides a learning signal on the entire area of the image with bounding box annotations, achieving globally consistent and disentangled instance representation. Our method exploits multi-task learning of bottom-up keypoint estimation, bounding box regression, and contrastive instance embedding learning, without additional computational cost during inference. BoIR is effective for crowded scenes, outperforming state-of-the-art on COCO val (0.8 AP), COCO test-dev (0.5 AP), CrowdPose (4.9 AP), and OCHuman (3.5 AP). Code will be available at https://github.com/uyoung-jeong/BoIR