# UnCageNet: Tracking and Pose Estimation of Caged Animal

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07712 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07712/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4659/) (2013)
- [Markerless tracking of user-defined features with deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03142/) (2018)
- [APT-36K: A Large-scale Benchmark for Animal Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05683/) (2022)
- [STEP: Simultaneous Tracking and Estimation of Pose for Animals and Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13344/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Animal tracking and pose estimation systems, such as STEP (Simultaneous Tracking and Pose Estimation) and ViTPose, experience substantial performance drops when processing images and videos with cage structures and systematic occlusions. We present a three-stage preprocessing pipeline that addresses this limitation through: (1) cage segmentation using a Gabor-enhanced ResNet-UNet architecture with tunable orientation filters, (2) cage inpainting using CRFill for content-aware reconstruction of occluded regions, and (3) evaluation of pose estimation and tracking on the uncaged frames. Our Gabor-enhanced segmentation model leverages orientation-aware features with 72 directional kernels to accurately identify and segment cage structures that severely impair the performance of existing methods. Experimental validation demonstrates that removing cage occlusions through our pipeline enables pose estimation and tracking performance comparable to that in environments without occlusions. We also observe significant improvements in keypoint detection accuracy and trajectory consistency.