Enhanced Pose Estimation for Badminton Players via Improved YOLOv8-Pose with Efficient Local Attention

With the rapid development of sports analytics and artificial intelligence, accurate human pose estimation in badminton is becoming increasingly important. However, challenges such as the lack of domain-specific datasets and the complexity of athletes' movements continue to hinder progress in this area. To address these issues, we propose an enhanced pose estimation framework tailored to badminton players, built upon an improved YOLOv8-Pose architecture. In particular, we introduce an efficient local attention (ELA) mechanism that effectively captures fine-grained spatial dependencies and contextual information, thereby significantly improving the keypoint localization accuracy and overall pose estimation performance. To support this study, we construct a dedicated badminton pose dataset comprising 4000 manually annotated samples, captured using a Microsoft Kinect v2 camera. The raw data undergo careful processing and refinement through a combination of depth-assisted annotation and visual inspection to ensure high-quality ground truth keypoints. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth comparative analysis of multiple attention modules and their integration strategies within the network, offering generalizable insights to enhance pose estimation models in other sports domains. The experimental results show that the proposed ELA-enhanced YOLOv8-Pose model consistently achieves superior accuracy across multiple evaluation metrics, including the mean squared error (MSE), object keypoint similarity (OKS), and percentage of correct keypoints (PCK), highlighting its effectiveness and potential for broader applications in sports vision tasks.