Key Point Extraction the best method? I have been researching about determining some key points on an image, in this case I'm gonna use cloth (top side of human body) pictures. I want to detect some corner points on those. 

Example:



I have two solutions on my mind. One CNN with transpose layers resulting in heatmap where I can get points. The second is to get 24 number as output from the model meaning 12(x,y) point. I don't know which one will be better. 

In face point detection, they use the second method. In human pose estimation, they use method one. So what do you suggest me to use? or do you have any new ideas? Thanks
The 2nd method would make sense only if your object is at the same position in all test images. You would have such situation if you operated on crops located by a separate object detection algorithm. This happens to be the case in facial key-point detection. 

The 1st method would be much more robust to various object poses since it is translation covariant by design. If a keypoint is detected at location A, it will be equally well detected at any other position with the same set of parameters.