Keypoint Detection

Keypoint detection localizes specific anatomical or structural landmarks — body joints, facial features, hand articulations — enabling pose estimation, gesture recognition, and motion capture. OpenPose (2017) first demonstrated real-time multi-person pose estimation, and the field has since progressed through HRNet, ViTPose, and RTMPose pushing both accuracy and speed. Modern systems detect 133 whole-body keypoints (body + hands + face) in real-time on mobile devices. The applications span from sports biomechanics (analyzing an athlete's form frame-by-frame) to sign language recognition and AR avatar puppeteering.