Existing 3D human pose estimation methods use fixed computation strategies processing diverse action sequences, leading to computational redundancy for simple actions, insufficient high-frequency information capture for complex actions, and low long-sequence processing efficiency. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Spatial–Temporal Complexity-Aware Adaptive Computation Framework (CAAPoseFormer). First, a spatial–temporal coupled complexity quantification module is built to integrate spatial dispersion and temporal motion variance for graded action complexity quantification. On this basis, a time–frequency dual-domain adaptive pruning strategy is proposed to dynamically allocate temporal window length and frequency-domain DCT coefficients on demand. Furthermore, a mask-guided sparse interaction encoding mechanism is designed to enable efficient parallel computation of variable-length features by shielding invalid padding regions. Experiments on the Human3.6M dataset show that, versus the baseline PoseFormerV2, the proposed method cuts parameters by 85.3% and computational cost by 64.8% while retaining comparable accuracy (MPJPE 44.2 mm), boosting unit computational efficiency 2.8×. Moreover, compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods like MHFormer and MotionBERT, our method reduces computational costs (MACs) by 97.4% and nearly three orders of magnitude, respectively. This framework effectively breaks the inference bottleneck of high-precision models on low-power hardware, suiting latency-sensitive real-time applications well.
Zhang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.