An Improved High-Resolution Network-Based Method for Yoga-Pose Estimation

In this paper, SEPAM_HRNet, a high-resolution pose-estimation model that incorporates the squeeze-and-excitation and pixel-attention-mask (SEPAM) module is proposed. Feature pyramid extraction, channel attention, and pixel-attention masks are integrated into the SEPAM module, resulting in improved model performance. The construction of the model involves replacing ordinary convolutions with the plug-and-play SEPAM module, which leads to the creation of the SEPAMneck module and SEPAMblock module. To evaluate the model’s performance, the YOGA2022 human yoga poses teaching dataset is presented. This dataset comprises 15,350 images that capture ten basic yoga pose types—Warrior I Pose, Warrior II Pose, Bridge Pose, Downward Dog Pose, Flat Pose, Inclined Plank Pose, Seated Pose, Triangle Pose, Phantom Chair Pose, and Goddess Pose—with a total of five participants. The YOGA2022 dataset serves as a benchmark for evaluating the accuracy of the human pose-estimation model. The experimental results demonstrated that the SEPAM_HRNet model achieved improved accuracy in predicting human keypoints on both the common objects in context (COCO) calibration set and the YOGA2022 calibration set, compared to other state-of-the-art human pose-estimation models with the same image resolution and environment configuration. These findings emphasize the superior performance of the SEPAM_HRNet model.