Towards Multi-Modal Animal Pose Estimation: An In-Depth Analysis

Animal pose estimation (APE) aims to locate the animal body parts using a diverse array of sensor and modality inputs, which is crucial for research across neuroscience, biomechanics, and veterinary medicine. By evaluating 178 papers since 2013, APE methods are categorised by sensor and modality types, learning paradigms, experimental setup, and application domains, presenting detailed analyses of current trends, challenges, and future directions in single- and multi-modality APE systems. The analysis also highlights the transition between human and animal pose estimation. Additionally, 2D and 3D APE datasets and evaluation metrics based on different sensors and modalities are provided. A regularly updated project page is provided here: https://github.com/ChennyDeng/MM-APE.