From Synthetic to Real: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Animal Pose Estimation

Abstract

Animal pose estimation is an important field that has received increasing attention in the recent years. The main challenge for this task is the lack of labeled data. Existing works circumvent this problem with pseudo labels generated from data of other easily accessible domains such as synthetic data. However, these pseudo labels are noisy even with consistency check or confidence-based filtering due to the domain shift in the data. To solve this problem, we design a multi-scale domain adaptation module (MDAM) to reduce the domain gap between the synthetic and real data. We further introduce an online coarse-to-fine pseudo label updating strategy. Specifically, we propose a self-distillation module in an inner coarse-update loop and a mean-teacher in an outer fine-update loop to generate