Attentive Keypoint Identification: Progressive Spatiotemporal Refinement for Video-based Human Pose Estimation

Video-based human pose estimation has vast applications such as action recognition, sports analytics, and crime detection. However, this task is challenging as it involves interpreting both spatial context and temporal dynamics to accurately localize human anatomical keypoints in video sequences. Current approaches, often based on attention mechanisms, perform well but struggle in challenging scenarios like rapid motion and pose occlusion. We attribute these failures to two fundamental limitations: spatial uniformity, where models indiscriminately assign attention to both joint-relevant features and background clutter, thereby introducing spatial noise; and temporal rigidity, an inability to adapt to large joint displacements, resulting in severe feature misalignment during rapid motion. To overcome these challenges, we introduce PSTPose, a novel progressive spatiotemporal refinement framework. Specifically, to address the spatial uniformity problem, we propose a Discriminative Feature Enhancement (DFE) module that emphasizes joint-relevant features and a Feature Cluster Grouping (FCG) module that forms compact, semantically meaningful regions. For the temporal rigidity problem, we introduce a Deformable Spatiotemporal Fusion (DSF) module that adaptively aligns features across consecutive frames via deformation-aware sampling. This design ensures robust keypoint localization, particularly in cluttered and dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments on three large-scale benchmarks, PoseTrack2017, PoseTrack2018, PoseTrack21, demonstrate that PSTPose establishes a new state-of-the-art.