  We propose a new method to analyze the impact of errors in algorithms for
multi-instance pose estimation and a principled benchmark that can be used to
compare them. We define and characterize three classes of errors -
localization, scoring, and background - study how they are influenced by
instance attributes and their impact on an algorithm's performance. Our
technique is applied to compare the two leading methods for human pose
estimation on the COCO Dataset, measure the sensitivity of pose estimation with
respect to instance size, type and number of visible keypoints, clutter due to
multiple instances, and the relative score of instances. The performance of
algorithms, and the types of error they make, are highly dependent on all these
variables, but mostly on the number of keypoints and the clutter. The analysis
and software tools we propose offer a novel and insightful approach for
understanding the behavior of pose estimation algorithms and an effective
method for measuring their strengths and weaknesses.
