Boosting Semi-Supervised 2D Human Pose Estimation by Revisiting Data Augmentation and Consistency Training

23 Sept 2024 (modified: 05 Feb 2025)Submitted to ICLR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: semi-supervised learning, human pose estimation, data augmentation, consistency training
TL;DR: This research paper introduces a semi-supervised learning approach for human pose estimation by leveraging advanced data augmentations and concise consistency training.
Abstract: The 2D human pose estimation (HPE) is a basic visual problem. However, its supervised learning requires massive keypoint labels, which is labor-intensive to collect. Thus, we aim at boosting a pose estimator by excavating extra unlabeled data with semi-supervised learning (SSL). Most previous SSHPE methods are consistency-based and strive to maintain consistent outputs for differently augmented inputs. Under this genre, we find that SSHPE can be boosted from two cores: advanced data augmentations and concise consistency training ways. Specifically, for the first core, we discover the synergistic effects of existing augmentations, and reveal novel paradigms for conveniently producing new superior HPE-oriented augmentations which can more effectively add noise on unlabeled samples. We can therefore establish paired easy-hard augmentations with larger difficulty gaps. For the second core, we propose to repeatedly augment unlabeled images with diverse hard augmentations, and generate multi-path predictions sequentially for optimizing multi-losses in a single network. This simple and compact design is interpretable, and easily benefits from newly found augmentations. Comparing to state-of-the-art SSL approaches, our method brings substantial improvements on public datasets. Code will be released for academic use.
Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning
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Submission Number: 2733
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