# Model-based Metric 3D Shape and Motion Reconstruction of Wild Bottlenose Dolphins in Drone-Shot Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15782 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15782/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Learning Category-Specific Mesh Reconstruction from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07549/) (2018)
- [3D Menagerie: Modeling the 3D shape and pose of animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07700/) (2016)
- [Learning to Predict 3D Objects with an Interpolation-based Differentiable Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01210/) (2019)
- [BANMo: Building Animatable 3D Neural Models from Many Casual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12761/) (2021)
- [LASR: Learning Articulated Shape Reconstruction from a Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02976/) (2021)
- [MagicPony: Learning Articulated 3D Animals in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12497/) (2022)
- [Who Left the Dogs Out? 3D Animal Reconstruction with Expectation Maximization in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11110/) (2020)
- [LASSIE: Learning Articulated Shapes from Sparse Image Ensemble via 3D Part Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03434/) (2022)
- [DOVE: Learning Deformable 3D Objects by Watching Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10844/) (2021)
- [DIB-R++: Learning to Predict Lighting and Material with a Hybrid Differentiable Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00140/) (2021)
- [BARC: Learning to Regress 3D Dog Shape from Images by Exploiting Breed Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15536/) (2022)
- [3D Bird Reconstruction: a Dataset, Model, and Shape Recovery from a Single View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06133/) (2020)
- [Hi-LASSIE: High-Fidelity Articulated Shape and Skeleton Discovery from Sparse Image Ensemble](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11042/) (2022)
- [Birds of a Feather: Capturing Avian Shape Models from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09396/) (2021)
- [ARTIC3D: Learning Robust Articulated 3D Shapes from Noisy Web Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04619/) (2023)
- [AniMer: Animal Pose and Shape Estimation Using Family Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00837/) (2024)
- [Generative Zoo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08101/) (2024)
- [Dessie: Disentanglement for Articulated 3D Horse Shape and Pose Estimation from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03438/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [The SA-FARI Dataset: Segment Anything in Footage of Animals for Recognition and Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15622/) (2025)
- [Advances and Trends in the 3D Reconstruction of the Shape and Motion of Animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16062/) (2025)
- [Kirin: Animal Motion Generation from In-the-Wild Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01823/) (2026)
- [ORMA: Optimization-based Monocular 4D Reconstruction of Articulated Animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37986/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We address the problem of estimating the metric 3D shape and motion of wild dolphins from monocular video, with the aim of assessing their body condition. While considerable progress has been made in reconstructing 3D models of terrestrial quadrupeds, aquatic animals remain unexplored due to the difficulty of observing them in their natural underwater environment. To address this, we propose a model-based approach that incorporates a transmission model to account for water-induced occlusion. We apply our method to video captured under different sea conditions. We estimate mass and volume, and compare our results to a manual 2D measurements-based method. Additionally, we apply our method to video of captive animals with known ground truth mass. While in our experiments the manual approach is often more accurate, our method demonstrates a distinct advantage when applied to larger specimen. These findings highlight the potential of our method as a scalable and automated alternative for mass and volume estimation of dolphins from monocular video.