Animal pose estimation and tracking is important for wildlife monitoring and conservation research, and with limited expert time for labelling automated approaches are imperative. While human pose estimation and tracking has seen rapid progress thanks to large annotated datasets, animal pose remain challenging, due to large morphological and behavioural differences between species and limited annotated data.
PuTR-CouT is a transformer‑based counting‑by‑tracking framework designed for camera‑trap image sequences. It generates synthetic training data using structural priors to create pseudo‑tracking labels, enabling the tracker to associate detections across frames and estimate per‑species counts. The method improves upon the MaxBoxCount baseline on the iWildCam 2021 benchmark, offering competitive counting results along with multi‑species predictions and track‑level verification.
arXiv:2607. 02269v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated immense promise in Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG).
arXiv:2603.04163v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Wildlife re-identification aims to recognise individual animals by matching query images to a database of previously identified individuals, based...
The paper presents MaxBoxCount, the winning solution to the iWildCam 2021 Challenge, which tackles counting animals in camera‑trap image sequences without using count labels. It combines a robust species classification pipeline with a counting heuristic based on MegaDetector detections to estimate the number of unique individuals across short image bursts. The method addresses challenges posed by temporal discontinuities and the high cost of manual count annotations.
arXiv:2607. 09443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-term animal re-identification (ReID) must remain robust to gradual morphological evolution and seasonal appearance shifts.
The study investigates whether Vision Transformer (ViT)-based animal re-identification models learn biologically meaningful concepts. Using a DINOv3 backbone fine‑tuned on Western lowland gorilla images, the authors find that sex and age emerge as linear directions in the model’s representations, generalizing to unseen individuals with high AUROC scores. They demonstrate that the sex direction is causally used by the model, that fine‑tuning relocates these concepts within the network, and that the representations reflect a graded biological axis encoded redundantly across the population.
arXiv:2603. 24016v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) has traditionally focused on a few specific categories, restricting its applicability to real-world scenarios involving diverse objects.
The paper introduces a biologically inspired framework that learns object‑centric visual representations from raw videos without human annotations or camera calibration. By using motion boundaries detected via optical flow and clustering to create pseudo‑instance masks, the method supervises a single‑image encoder with pixel‑level pairwise metric learning. Training on 195 million pseudo‑labeled frames and expanding to 421 million frames through Motion‑Verified Self‑Training, the approach yields Swin‑based encoders that outperform or match supervised and self‑supervised baselines on tasks such as monocular depth estimation, 3D object detection, 3D occupancy prediction, and end‑to‑end planning.
arXiv:2607. 02680v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: MLLMs have shown strong zero-shot capabilities across diverse inputs such as across images, video, audio, and text.
arXiv:2608.30789v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised deep learning methods enable the rapid processing of ecological image data, but depend on a costly annotation process. Consequently, trainin...
arXiv:2606. 00548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) play an important role in agricultural production but are also associated with environmental, public health, and disease surveillance concerns.