# Towards Texture- And Shape-Independent 3D Keypoint Estimation in Birds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16633 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16633/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [Markerless tracking of user-defined features with deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03142/) (2018)
- [Animal Kingdom: A Large and Diverse Dataset for Animal Behavior Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08129/) (2022)
- [Creatures great and SMAL: Recovering the shape and motion of animals from video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05804/) (2018)
- [3D Bird Reconstruction: a Dataset, Model, and Shape Recovery from a Single View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06133/) (2020)
- [SuperAnimal pretrained pose estimation models for behavioral analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07436/) (2022)
- [AcinoSet: A 3D Pose Estimation Dataset and Baseline Models for Cheetahs in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13282/) (2021)
- [3D-POP -- An automated annotation approach to facilitate markerless 2D-3D tracking of freely moving birds with marker-based motion capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13174/) (2023)
- [3D-MuPPET: 3D Multi-Pigeon Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15316/) (2023)
- [UniAP: Towards Universal Animal Perception in Vision via Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09953/) (2023)
- [Robot-to-Robot Relative Pose Estimation using Humans as Markers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00820/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present a texture-independent approach to estimate and track 3D joint positions of multiple pigeons. For this purpose, we build upon the existing 3D-MuPPET framework, which estimates and tracks the 3D poses of up to 10 pigeons using a multi-view camera setup. We extend this framework by using a segmentation method that generates silhouettes of the individuals, which are then used to estimate 2D keypoints. Following 3D-MuPPET, these 2D keypoints are triangulated to infer 3D poses, and identities are matched in the first frame and tracked in 2D across subsequent frames. Our proposed texture-independent approach achieves comparable accuracy to the original texture-dependent 3D-MuPPET framework. Additionally, we explore our approach's applicability to other bird species. To do that, we infer the 2D joint positions of four bird species without additional fine-tuning the model trained on pigeons and obtain preliminary promising results. Thus, we think that our approach serves as a solid foundation and inspires the development of more robust and accurate texture-independent pose estimation frameworks.