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.
arXiv:2512.07776v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Monitoring critically endangered western lowland gorillas is currently hampered by the immense manual effort required to re-identify individuals fr...
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.
VastMAT is a large‑scale multi‑animal tracking benchmark featuring 2,947 videos, 337 animal categories, and over 3.6 million bounding boxes with 22,883 identity trajectories. It emphasizes high‑quality, expert‑reviewed annotations and introduces Seen‑category and Unseen‑category evaluation protocols, revealing significant challenges in tracking unseen animals. The authors also propose a lightweight Center‑Distance‑Augmented Association module that boosts HOTA scores for existing MOT methods without extra training.
ORMA is a training‑free framework that reconstructs articulated 4D representations of animals from monocular videos by decoupling pose and shape. It uses predicted pose as a reference for optimization and generative 3D priors to refine shape, aligning the result with the SMAL+ parametric model. The method combines per‑frame pose estimates with globally consistent camera poses, and further refines the reconstruction using self‑supervised DINO correspondences and temporal consistency, achieving improved accuracy on the new PAW4D benchmark and diverse real‑world videos.
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.
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:2609.36217v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A deeper understanding of brain function requires a precise, structured characterization of behavior.Yet, extracting behavioral representations from vi...
arXiv:2607. 09443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-term animal re-identification (ReID) must remain robust to gradual morphological evolution and seasonal appearance shifts.
arXiv:2606. 14094v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information.
Video panoptic segmentation (VPS) aims to jointly detect, segment, and track all objects while partitioning the video into semantically consistent regions. We introduce the task setting of unsupervised VPS, omitting any human supervision.
Kirin is a new framework that reconstructs 3D animal motion from in‑the‑wild videos, learns motion priors at scale, and generates realistic motion conditioned on text and image. It introduces AiM3D, the first large‑scale dataset of aligned video‑text‑motion tuples for quadruped animals, and uses an off‑the‑shelf image‑to‑3D model to automatically rig and animate 3D meshes with the generated motion. The framework and dataset provide a foundation for large‑scale, text and image‑conditioned animal motion generation and animation.
arXiv:2401. 10805v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the novel concept of visually Connecting Actions and Their Effects (CATE) in video understanding.