Pose Estimation — Heatmaps, CPM, OpenPose, SMPL
14 minA bounding box around a person tells you almost nothing about what they're doing — dancing, fighting, lifting a mug, falling. The answer lives in the body itself, in the geometry of arms, legs, torso, head. Pose estimation predicts joint locations and limbs so downstream tasks (activity recognition, motion capture, gesture interfaces, avatar animation) become tractable. The core architectural shift is from direct keypoint regression (broken for several reasons) to dense prediction via per-joint heatmaps.