Adept: Annotation-Denoising Auxiliary Tasks with Discrete Cosine Transform Map and Keypoint for Human-Centric Pretraining

Human-centric perception is the core of diverse computer vision tasks and has been a long-standing research focus. However, previous research studied these human-centric tasks individually, whose performance is largely limited to the size of the public task-specific datasets. Recent human-centric methods leverage the additional modalities, e.g., depth, to learn fine-grained semantic information, which limits the benefit of pretraining models due to their sensitivity to camera views and the scarcity of RGB-D data on the Internet. This paper improves the data scalability of human-centric pretraining methods by discarding depth information and exploring semantic information of RGB images in the frequency space by Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). We further propose new annotation denoising auxiliary tasks with keypoints and DCT maps to enforce the RGB image extractor to learn fine-grained semantic information of human bodies. Our extensive experiments show that when pretrained on large-scale datasets (COCO and AIC datasets) without depth annotation, our model achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods by +0.5 mAP on COCO, +1.4 PCKh on MPII and -0.51 EPE on Human3.6M for pose estimation, by +4.50 mIoU on Human3.6M for human parsing, by -3.14 MAE on SHA and -0.07 MAE on SHB for crowd counting, by +1.1 F1 score on SHA and +0.8 F1 score on SHA for crowd localization, and by +0.1 mAP on Market1501 and +0.8 mAP on MSMT for person ReID. We also validate the effectiveness of our method on MPII+NTURGBD datasets