  State-of-the-art human pose estimation methods are based on heat map
representation. In spite of the good performance, the representation has a few
issues in nature, such as not differentiable and quantization error. This work
shows that a simple integral operation relates and unifies the heat map
representation and joint regression, thus avoiding the above issues. It is
differentiable, efficient, and compatible with any heat map based methods. Its
effectiveness is convincingly validated via comprehensive ablation experiments
under various settings, specifically on 3D pose estimation, for the first time.
