Animal3D: A Comprehensive Dataset of 3D Animal Pose and Shape

TL;DR

Animal3D is the first extensive dataset of 3D animal poses and shapes, enabling improved research and benchmarking in animal pose estimation across multiple species.

Contribution

The paper introduces Animal3D, a high-quality, manually annotated dataset for 3D animal pose and shape estimation, and provides benchmark results demonstrating its utility.

Findings

Synthetic pre-training improves model performance.

Animal pose estimation remains challenging across species.

High-quality annotations enhance model training and evaluation.

Abstract

Accurately estimating the 3D pose and shape is an essential step towards understanding animal behavior, and can potentially benefit many downstream applications, such as wildlife conservation. However, research in this area is held back by the lack of a comprehensive and diverse dataset with high-quality 3D pose and shape annotations. In this paper, we propose Animal3D, the first comprehensive dataset for mammal animal 3D pose and shape estimation. Animal3D consists of 3379 images collected from 40 mammal species, high-quality annotations of 26 keypoints, and importantly the pose and shape parameters of the SMAL model. All annotations were labeled and checked manually in a multi-stage process to ensure highest quality results. Based on the Animal3D dataset, we benchmark representative shape and pose estimation models at: (1) supervised learning from only the Animal3D data, (2) synthetic to real transfer from synthetically generated images, and (3) fine-tuning human pose and shape estimation models. Our experimental results demonstrate that predicting the 3D shape and pose of animals across species remains a very challenging task, despite significant advances in human pose estimation. Our results further demonstrate that synthetic pre-training is a viable strategy to boost the model performance. Overall, Animal3D opens new directions for facilitating future research in animal 3D pose and shape estimation, and is publicly available.