WildPose: HRNet-based Lightweight and Efficient Wildlife Pose Estimation

Lightweight and efficient wildlife monitoring algorithms, including pose estimation, that can operate on edge devices with limited computational resources are urgently needed for wildlife studies and protections. To reduce computational costs while maintaining accuracy in animal pose estimation, this paper introduces WildPose, an HRNet-w32 based model, designed, which integrates Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) to enhance important feature representations without complex operations, Non-Local Blocks (NLB) to capture long-range contextual information and handle occlusions, and Depthwise Convolutions (DWConv) to reduce computational complexity and parameters. Additionally, the Online Hard Keypoint Mining with Mean Squared Error (OHKMSE) loss function is employed to improve accuracy for occluded keypoints detection by focusing on harder keypoints. When evaluated on the largest wildlife dataset of Animal Kingdom, WildPose demonstrated a nice trade-off between accuracy and efficiency, 75% reduction in parameters and 65% reduction in GFLOPs, while achieving an increased Percentage of Correct Keypoints (PCK) for occluded keypoints such as the hip, ankle, and tail. Therefore, WildPose can serve as a practical solution for real-time wildlife monitoring and artificial intelligence-based ecological studies, especially in resource-constrained environments.