Enhanced human pose estimation using YOLOv8 with Integrated SimDLKA attention mechanism and DCIOU loss function: Analysis of human body behavior and posture

Pose estimation is a crucial task in the field of human motion analysis, and detecting poses is a topic of significant interest. Traditional detection algorithms are not only time-consuming and labor-intensive but also suffer from deficiencies in accuracy and objectivity. To address these issues, we propose an improved pose estimation algorithm based on the YOLOv8 framework. By incorporating a novel attention mechanism, SimDLKA, into the original YOLOv8 model, we enhance the model’s ability to selectively focus on input data, thereby improving its decoupling and flexibility. In the feature fusion module of YOLOv8, we replace the original Bottleneck module with the SimDLKA module and integrate it with the C2F module to form the C2F-SimDLKA structure, which more effectively fuses global semantics, especially for medium to large targets. Furthermore, we introduce a new loss function, DCIOU, based on the YOLOv8 loss function, to improve the forward propagation of model training. Results indicate that our new loss function has a 3–5 loss value reduction compared to other loss functions. Additionally, we have independently constructed a large-scale pose estimation dataset, HP, employing various data augmentation strategies, and utilized the open-source COCO and MPII datasets for model training. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to the traditional YOLOv8, our improved YOLOv8 algorithm increases the mAP value on the pose estimation dataset by 2.7% and the average frame rate by approximately 3 frames. This method provides a valuable reference for pose detection in pose estimation.