PromptPose: Language Prompt Helps Animal Pose Estimation

Recently, animal pose estimation is attracting increasing interest from the academia (e.g., wildlife and conservation biology) focusing on animal behavior understanding. However, currently animal pose estimation suffers from small datasets and large data variances, making it difficult to obtain robust performance. To tackle this problem, we propose that the rich knowledge about relations between pose-related semantics learned by language models can be utilized to improve the animal pose estimation. Therefore, in this study, we introduce a novel PromptPose framework to effectively apply language models for better understanding the animal poses based on prompt training. In PromptPose, we propose that adapting the language knowledge to the visual animal poses is key to achieve effective animal pose estimation. To this end, we first introduce textual prompts to build connections between textual semantic descriptions and supporting animal keypoint features. Moreover, we further devise a pixel-level contrastive loss to build dense connections between textual descriptions and local image features, as well as a semantic-level contrastive loss to bridge the gap between global contrasts in language-image cross-modal pre-training and local contrasts in dense prediction. In practice, the PromptPose has shown great benefits for improving animal pose estimation. By conducting extensive experiments, we show that our PromptPose achieves superior performance under both supervised and few-shot settings, outperforming representative methods by a large margin. The source code and models will be made publicly available.