Animal Pose Estimation Based on Contrastive Learning with Dynamic Conditional Prompts

Abstract

Traditional animal pose estimation techniques based on images face significant hurdles, including scarce training data, costly data annotation, and challenges posed by non-rigid deformation. Addressing these issues, we proposed dynamic conditional prompts for the prior knowledge of animal poses in language modalities. Then, we utilized a multimodal (language–image) collaborative training and contrastive learning model to estimate animal poses. Our method leverages text prompt templates and image feature conditional tokens to construct dynamic conditional prompts that integrate rich linguistic prior knowledge in depth. The text prompts highlight key points and relevant descriptions of animal poses, enhancing their representation in the learning process. Meanwhile, transformed via a fully connected non-linear network, image feature conditional tokens efficiently embed the image features into these prompts. The resultant context vector, derived from the fusion of the text prompt template and the image feature conditional token, generates a dynamic conditional prompt for each input sample. By utilizing a contrastive language–image pre-training model, our approach effectively synchronizes and strengthens the training interactions between image and text features, resulting in an improvement to the precision of key-point localization and overall animal pose estimation accuracy. The experimental results show that language–image contrastive learning based on dynamic conditional prompts enhances the average accuracy of animal pose estimation on the AP-10K and Animal Pose datasets.

Keywords

• animal pose estimation
• dynamic conditional prompt
• text prompt
• contrastive learning