Anti-drift pose tracker (ADPT): A transformer-based network for robust animal pose estimation cross-species

Deep learning-based methods have advanced animal pose estimation, enhancing accuracy and efficiency in quantifying animal behavior. However, these methods frequently experience tracking drift, where noise-induced jumps in body point estimates compromise reliability. Here, we present the Anti-Drift Pose Tracker (ADPT), a transformer-based tool that mitigates tracking drift in behavioral analysis. Extensive experiments across cross-species datasets--including proprietary mouse and monkey recordings and public Drosophila and macaque datasets--demonstrate that ADPT significantly reduces drift and surpasses existing models like DeepLabCut and SLEAP in accuracy. Moreover, ADPT achieved 93.16% identification accuracy for 10 unmarked mice and 90.36% accuracy for freely interacting unmarked mice, which can be further refined to 99.72%, enhancing both anti-drift performance and pose estimation accuracy in social interactions. With its end-to-end design, ADPT is computationally efficient and suitable for real-time analysis, offering a robust solution for reproducible animal behavior studies. The ADPT code is available at https://github.com/tangguoling/ADPT.