MixSynthFormer: A Transformer Encoder-like Structure with Mixed Synthetic Self-attention for Efficient Human Pose Estimation

Human pose estimation in videos has wide-ranging practical applications across various fields, many of which require fast inference on resource-scarce devices, necessitating the development of efficient and accurate algorithms. Previous works have demonstrated the feasibility of exploiting motion continuity to conduct pose estimation using sparsely sampled frames with transformer-based models. However, these methods only consider the temporal relation while neglecting spatial attention, and the complexity of dot product self-attention calculations in transformers are quadratically proportional to the embedding size. To address these limitations, we propose MixSynthFormer, a transformer encoder-like model with MLP-based mixed synthetic attention. By mixing synthesized spatial and temporal attentions, our model incorporates inter-joint and inter-frame importance and can accurately estimate human poses in an entire video sequence from sparsely sampled frames. Additionally, the flexible design of our model makes it versatile for other motion synthesis tasks. Our extensive experiments on 2D/3D pose estimation, body mesh recovery, and motion prediction validate the effectiveness and efficiency of MixSynthFormer. The code is available at https://github.com/ireneesun/MixSynthFormer.git