Pose estimation is a systems problem, not a model bake-off
· 6 min read
Point a camera at a person, draw a skeleton, call it live. That demo survives a recorded clip and dies on a messy stream: variable lighting, dropped frames, busy backgrounds, and users who feel 80 ms of lag even if they cannot name it.
Accuracy without a calm loop is a lab number. End-to-end time to a stable overlay is what people experience. Treat capture, inference, and render as three jobs that can each fail independently.
Figure 1. Vision pipelines succeed when the frame path stays explicit: capture, analyze, present. Pose work has the same loop, just with landmarks instead of boxes. Source: Microsoft Learn: image analysis overview.