Recently， the leading human pose estimation algorithms are heatmap-based algorithms. Heatmap decoding （i.e. transforming heatmaps to coordinates of human joint points） is a basic step of these algorithms. The existing heatmap decoding algorithms neglect the effect of systematic errors. Therefore， an error compensation based heatmap decoding algorithm was proposed. Firstly， an error compensation factor of the system was estimated during training. Then， the error compensation factor was used to compensate the prediction errors including both systematic error and random error of human joint points in the inference stage. Extensive experiments were carried out on different network architectures， input resolutions， evaluation metrics and datasets. The results show that compared with the existing optimal algorithm， the proposed algorithm achieves significant accuracy gain. Specifically， by using the proposed algorithm， the Average Precision （AP） of the HRNet-W48-256×192 model is improved by 2.86 percentage points on Common Objects in COntext （COCO）dataset， and the Percentage of Correct Keypoints with respect to head （PCKh） of the ResNet-152-256×256 model is improved by 7.8 percentage points on Max Planck Institute for Informatics （MPII）dataset. Besides， unlike the existing algorithms， the proposed algorithm did not need Gaussian smoothing preprocessing and derivation operation， so that it is 2 times faster than the existing optimal algorithm. It can be seen that the proposed algorithm has applicable values to performing fast and accurate human pose estimation.