Towards Part-Aware Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation: An Architecture Search Approach

Even though most existing monocular 3D pose estimation approaches achieve very competitive results, they ignore the heterogeneity among human body parts by estimating them with the same network architecture. To accurately estimate 3D poses of different body parts, we attempt to build a part-aware 3D pose estimator by searching a set of network architectures. Consequently, our model automatically learns to select a suitable architecture to estimate each body part. Compared to models built on the commonly used ResNet-50 backbone, it reduces 62% parameters and achieves better performance. With roughly the same computational complexity as previous models, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on both the single-person and multi-person 3D pose estimation benchmarks.