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In this paper, we focus on tackling the precise keypoint coordinates regression task. Most existing approaches adopt complicated networks with a large number of parameters, leading to a heavy model with poor cost-effectiveness in practice. To overcome this limitation, we develop a small yet discrimicative model called STair Network, which can be simply stacked towards an accurate multi-stage pose estimation system. Specifically, to reduce computational cost, STair Network is composed of novel basic feature extraction blocks which focus on promoting feature diversity and obtaining rich local representations with fewer parameters, enabling a satisfactory balance on efficiency and performance. To further improve the performance, we introduce two mechanisms with negligible computational cost, focusing on feature fusion and replenish. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the STair Network on two standard datasets, e.g., 1-stage STair Network achieves a higher accuracy than HRNet by 5.5% on COCO test dataset with 80\% fewer parameters and 68% fewer GFLOPs., The paper has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence

Deep neural network with multi-scale feature fusion has achieved great success in human pose estimation. However, drawbacks still exist in these methods: 1) they consider multi-scale features equally, which may over-emphasize redundant features; 2) preferring deeper structures, they can learn features with the strong semantic representation, but tend to lose natural discriminative information; 3) to attain good performance, they rely heavily on pretraining, which is time-consuming, or even unavailable practically. To mitigate these problems, we propose a novel comprehensive recalibration model called Pyramid GAting Network (PGA-Net) that is capable of distillating, selecting, and fusing the discriminative and attention-aware features at different scales and different levels (i.e., both semantic and natural levels). Meanwhile, focusing on fusing features both selectively and comprehensively, PGA-Net can demonstrate remarkable stability and encouraging performance even without pre-training, making the model can be trained truly from scratch. We demonstrate the effectiveness of PGA-Net through validating on COCO and MPII benchmarks, attaining new state-of-the-art performance. https://github.com/ssr0512/PGA-Net

Visual object tracking is a challenging task considering illumination variation, occlusion, rotation, deformation and other problems. In this paper, we extend a Siamese INstance search Tracker (SINT) with model updating mechanism to improve its tracking robustness. SINT uses convolutional neural network (CNN) features, and compares the new frame features with the target features in the first frame. The candidate region with the highest similarity score is considered as the tracking result. However, SINT is not robust against large target variation because the matching model is not updated during the whole tracking process. To combat this defect, we propose an Ensemble Siamese Tracker (EST), where the final similarity score is also affected by the similarity with tracking results in recent frames instead of solely considering the first frame. Tracking results in recent frames are used to adjust the model for continuous target change. Meanwhile, we combine large displacement optical flow method with EST to further improve the performance (called EST+). We test the proposed EST and EST+ on a standard tracking benchmark OTB. It turns out the average overlap ratio of EST and EST+ increase 2.72% and 3.55% respectively compared with SINT on OTB 2013, which contains 51 video sequences. For the OTB 100, the average overlap ratio gain is 4.2%.