transformers/docs/source/en/model_doc/vitpose.md
Quentin Gallouédec de24fb63ed
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2025-06-13 11:07:09 +00:00

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ViTPose

PyTorch

Overview

The ViTPose model was proposed in ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation by Yufei Xu, Jing Zhang, Qiming Zhang, Dacheng Tao. ViTPose employs a standard, non-hierarchical Vision Transformer as backbone for the task of keypoint estimation. A simple decoder head is added on top to predict the heatmaps from a given image. Despite its simplicity, the model gets state-of-the-art results on the challenging MS COCO Keypoint Detection benchmark. The model was further improved in ViTPose++: Vision Transformer for Generic Body Pose Estimation where the authors employ a mixture-of-experts (MoE) module in the ViT backbone along with pre-training on more data, which further enhances the performance.

The abstract from the paper is the following:

Although no specific domain knowledge is considered in the design, plain vision transformers have shown excellent performance in visual recognition tasks. However, little effort has been made to reveal the potential of such simple structures for pose estimation tasks. In this paper, we show the surprisingly good capabilities of plain vision transformers for pose estimation from various aspects, namely simplicity in model structure, scalability in model size, flexibility in training paradigm, and transferability of knowledge between models, through a simple baseline model called ViTPose. Specifically, ViTPose employs plain and non-hierarchical vision transformers as backbones to extract features for a given person instance and a lightweight decoder for pose estimation. It can be scaled up from 100M to 1B parameters by taking the advantages of the scalable model capacity and high parallelism of transformers, setting a new Pareto front between throughput and performance. Besides, ViTPose is very flexible regarding the attention type, input resolution, pre-training and finetuning strategy, as well as dealing with multiple pose tasks. We also empirically demonstrate that the knowledge of large ViTPose models can be easily transferred to small ones via a simple knowledge token. Experimental results show that our basic ViTPose model outperforms representative methods on the challenging MS COCO Keypoint Detection benchmark, while the largest model sets a new state-of-the-art.

drawing

ViTPose architecture. Taken from the original paper.

This model was contributed by nielsr and sangbumchoi. The original code can be found here.

Usage Tips

ViTPose is a so-called top-down keypoint detection model. This means that one first uses an object detector, like RT-DETR, to detect people (or other instances) in an image. Next, ViTPose takes the cropped images as input and predicts the keypoints for each of them.

import torch
import requests
import numpy as np

from PIL import Image

from transformers import AutoProcessor, RTDetrForObjectDetection, VitPoseForPoseEstimation

device = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu"

url = "http://images.cocodataset.org/val2017/000000000139.jpg"
image = Image.open(requests.get(url, stream=True).raw)

# ------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Stage 1. Detect humans on the image
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------

# You can choose any detector of your choice
person_image_processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("PekingU/rtdetr_r50vd_coco_o365")
person_model = RTDetrForObjectDetection.from_pretrained("PekingU/rtdetr_r50vd_coco_o365", device_map=device)

inputs = person_image_processor(images=image, return_tensors="pt").to(device)

with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = person_model(**inputs)

results = person_image_processor.post_process_object_detection(
    outputs, target_sizes=torch.tensor([(image.height, image.width)]), threshold=0.3
)
result = results[0]  # take first image results

# Human label refers 0 index in COCO dataset
person_boxes = result["boxes"][result["labels"] == 0]
person_boxes = person_boxes.cpu().numpy()

# Convert boxes from VOC (x1, y1, x2, y2) to COCO (x1, y1, w, h) format
person_boxes[:, 2] = person_boxes[:, 2] - person_boxes[:, 0]
person_boxes[:, 3] = person_boxes[:, 3] - person_boxes[:, 1]

# ------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Stage 2. Detect keypoints for each person found
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------

image_processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("usyd-community/vitpose-base-simple")
model = VitPoseForPoseEstimation.from_pretrained("usyd-community/vitpose-base-simple", device_map=device)

inputs = image_processor(image, boxes=[person_boxes], return_tensors="pt").to(device)

with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(**inputs)

pose_results = image_processor.post_process_pose_estimation(outputs, boxes=[person_boxes])
image_pose_result = pose_results[0]  # results for first image

ViTPose++ models

The best checkpoints are those of the ViTPose++ paper. ViTPose++ models employ a so-called Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture for the ViT backbone, resulting in better performance.

The ViTPose+ checkpoints use 6 experts, hence 6 different dataset indices can be passed. An overview of the various dataset indices is provided below:

Pass the dataset_index argument in the forward of the model to indicate which experts to use for each example in the batch. Example usage is shown below:

image_processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("usyd-community/vitpose-plus-base")
model = VitPoseForPoseEstimation.from_pretrained("usyd-community/vitpose-plus-base", device=device)

inputs = image_processor(image, boxes=[person_boxes], return_tensors="pt").to(device)

dataset_index = torch.tensor([0], device=device) # must be a tensor of shape (batch_size,)

with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(**inputs, dataset_index=dataset_index)

The ViTPose+ checkpoints use 6 experts, hence 6 different dataset indices can be passed. An overview of the various dataset indices is provided below:

Visualization

To visualize the various keypoints, one can either leverage the supervision [library](https://github.com/roboflow/supervision (requires pip install supervision):

import supervision as sv

xy = torch.stack([pose_result['keypoints'] for pose_result in image_pose_result]).cpu().numpy()
scores = torch.stack([pose_result['scores'] for pose_result in image_pose_result]).cpu().numpy()

key_points = sv.KeyPoints(
    xy=xy, confidence=scores
)

edge_annotator = sv.EdgeAnnotator(
    color=sv.Color.GREEN,
    thickness=1
)
vertex_annotator = sv.VertexAnnotator(
    color=sv.Color.RED,
    radius=2
)
annotated_frame = edge_annotator.annotate(
    scene=image.copy(),
    key_points=key_points
)
annotated_frame = vertex_annotator.annotate(
    scene=annotated_frame,
    key_points=key_points
)

Alternatively, one can also visualize the keypoints using OpenCV (requires pip install opencv-python):

import math
import cv2

def draw_points(image, keypoints, scores, pose_keypoint_color, keypoint_score_threshold, radius, show_keypoint_weight):
    if pose_keypoint_color is not None:
        assert len(pose_keypoint_color) == len(keypoints)
    for kid, (kpt, kpt_score) in enumerate(zip(keypoints, scores)):
        x_coord, y_coord = int(kpt[0]), int(kpt[1])
        if kpt_score > keypoint_score_threshold:
            color = tuple(int(c) for c in pose_keypoint_color[kid])
            if show_keypoint_weight:
                cv2.circle(image, (int(x_coord), int(y_coord)), radius, color, -1)
                transparency = max(0, min(1, kpt_score))
                cv2.addWeighted(image, transparency, image, 1 - transparency, 0, dst=image)
            else:
                cv2.circle(image, (int(x_coord), int(y_coord)), radius, color, -1)

def draw_links(image, keypoints, scores, keypoint_edges, link_colors, keypoint_score_threshold, thickness, show_keypoint_weight, stick_width = 2):
    height, width, _ = image.shape
    if keypoint_edges is not None and link_colors is not None:
        assert len(link_colors) == len(keypoint_edges)
        for sk_id, sk in enumerate(keypoint_edges):
            x1, y1, score1 = (int(keypoints[sk[0], 0]), int(keypoints[sk[0], 1]), scores[sk[0]])
            x2, y2, score2 = (int(keypoints[sk[1], 0]), int(keypoints[sk[1], 1]), scores[sk[1]])
            if (
                x1 > 0
                and x1 < width
                and y1 > 0
                and y1 < height
                and x2 > 0
                and x2 < width
                and y2 > 0
                and y2 < height
                and score1 > keypoint_score_threshold
                and score2 > keypoint_score_threshold
            ):
                color = tuple(int(c) for c in link_colors[sk_id])
                if show_keypoint_weight:
                    X = (x1, x2)
                    Y = (y1, y2)
                    mean_x = np.mean(X)
                    mean_y = np.mean(Y)
                    length = ((Y[0] - Y[1]) ** 2 + (X[0] - X[1]) ** 2) ** 0.5
                    angle = math.degrees(math.atan2(Y[0] - Y[1], X[0] - X[1]))
                    polygon = cv2.ellipse2Poly(
                        (int(mean_x), int(mean_y)), (int(length / 2), int(stick_width)), int(angle), 0, 360, 1
                    )
                    cv2.fillConvexPoly(image, polygon, color)
                    transparency = max(0, min(1, 0.5 * (keypoints[sk[0], 2] + keypoints[sk[1], 2])))
                    cv2.addWeighted(image, transparency, image, 1 - transparency, 0, dst=image)
                else:
                    cv2.line(image, (x1, y1), (x2, y2), color, thickness=thickness)


# Note: keypoint_edges and color palette are dataset-specific
keypoint_edges = model.config.edges

palette = np.array(
    [
        [255, 128, 0],
        [255, 153, 51],
        [255, 178, 102],
        [230, 230, 0],
        [255, 153, 255],
        [153, 204, 255],
        [255, 102, 255],
        [255, 51, 255],
        [102, 178, 255],
        [51, 153, 255],
        [255, 153, 153],
        [255, 102, 102],
        [255, 51, 51],
        [153, 255, 153],
        [102, 255, 102],
        [51, 255, 51],
        [0, 255, 0],
        [0, 0, 255],
        [255, 0, 0],
        [255, 255, 255],
    ]
)

link_colors = palette[[0, 0, 0, 0, 7, 7, 7, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 16, 16, 16, 16, 16, 16, 16]]
keypoint_colors = palette[[16, 16, 16, 16, 16, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]]

numpy_image = np.array(image)

for pose_result in image_pose_result:
    scores = np.array(pose_result["scores"])
    keypoints = np.array(pose_result["keypoints"])

    # draw each point on image
    draw_points(numpy_image, keypoints, scores, keypoint_colors, keypoint_score_threshold=0.3, radius=4, show_keypoint_weight=False)

    # draw links
    draw_links(numpy_image, keypoints, scores, keypoint_edges, link_colors, keypoint_score_threshold=0.3, thickness=1, show_keypoint_weight=False)

pose_image = Image.fromarray(numpy_image)
pose_image
drawing

Resources

A list of official Hugging Face and community (indicated by 🌎) resources to help you get started with ViTPose. If you're interested in submitting a resource to be included here, please feel free to open a Pull Request and we'll review it! The resource should ideally demonstrate something new instead of duplicating an existing resource.

  • A demo of ViTPose on images and video can be found here.
  • A notebook illustrating inference and visualization can be found here.

VitPoseImageProcessor

autodoc VitPoseImageProcessor - preprocess - post_process_pose_estimation

VitPoseConfig

autodoc VitPoseConfig

VitPoseForPoseEstimation

autodoc VitPoseForPoseEstimation - forward