Learning Topology-Aware Dynamic Associations for Robust Multi-Person Pose Estimation

Abstract

Multi-person pose estimation in real-world scenarios remains a challenging task due to frequent occlusions, scale variations, and complex human interactions. Existing methods often rely on fixed keypoint association patterns that fail to capture the dynamic and context-dependent nature of human body topologies, leading to misalignment and false detections. In this work, we propose a topology-aware dynamic association framework that adaptively models inter-keypoint relationships conditioned on local context and pose topology. The proposed framework comprises three stages: a human-to-keypoint detection module for coarse localization, a dynamic keypoint association module that learns flexible connectivity patterns between joints, and a fine-grained refinement module for precise pose adjustment. By integrating topological priors into dynamic learning and multi-stage optimization, our proposed method effectively mitigates the issues caused by occlusions and overlapping instances. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially in crowded and occlusion-heavy scenes.