• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.69-75
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• 2023

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in deep learning-based animal pose estimation, especially in the areas of animal behavior analysis and healthcare. However, existing animal pose estimation techniques do not perform well when body parts are occluded or not present. In particular, the occlusion of dog tail or ear might lead to a significant degradation of performance in pet behavior and emotion recognition. In this paper, to solve this intractable problem, we propose a simple yet novel framework for pet pose estimation where pet pose is predicted on an outpainted image where some body parts hidden outside the input image are reconstructed by the image inpainting network preceding the pose estimation network, and we performed a preliminary study to test the feasibility of the proposed approach. We assessed CE-GAN and BAT-Fill for image outpainting, and evaluated SimpleBaseline for pet pose estimation. Our experimental results show that pet pose estimation on outpainted images generated using BAT-Fill outperforms the existing methods of pose estimation on outpainting-less input image.