Recognition of freely selected keypoints on human limbs

Nearly all Human Pose Estimation (HPE) datasets consist of a fixed set of keypoints. Standard HPE models trained on such datasets can only detect these keypoints. If more points are desired, they have to be manually annotated and the model needs to be retrained. Our approach leverages the Vision Transformer architecture to extend the capability of the model to detect arbitrary keypoints on the limbs of persons. We propose two different approaches to encode the desired keypoints. (1) Each keypoint is defined by its position along the line between the two enclosing key-points from the fixed set and its relative distance between this line and the edge of the limb. (2) Keypoints are defined as coordinates on a norm pose. Both approaches are based on the TokenPose [12] architecture, while the key-point tokens that correspond to the fixed keypoints are replaced with our novel module. Experiments show that our approaches achieve similar results to TokenPose on the fixed keypoints and are capable of detecting arbitrary keypoints on the limbs