ProbPose: A Probabilistic Approach to 2D Human Pose Estimation

Current Human Pose Estimation methods have achieved significant improvements. However, state-of-the-art models ignore out-of-image keypoints and use uncalibrated heatmaps as keypoint location representation. To address these limitations, we propose ProbPose, which predicts for each keypoint: a calibrated probability of keypoint presence at each location in the activation window, the probability of being outside of it, and its predicted visibility. To address the lack of evaluation protocols for out-of-image keypoints, we introduce the CropCOCO dataset and the Extended OKS (Ex-OKS) metric, which extends OKS to out-of-image points. Tested on COCO, CropCOCO, and OCHuman, ProbPose shows significant gains in out-of-image keypoint localization while also improving in-image localization through data augmentation. Additionally, the model improves robustness along the edges of the bounding box and offers better flexibility in keypoint evaluation. The codeand models will be released on the project website for research purposes.