Animal pose estimation is often constrained by the scarcity of annotations and the diversity of scenarios and species. The pseudo-label generation based unsupervised domain adaptation paradigm, which discriminates the predicted keypoints of unlabeled data based on the skeleton position consistency, has demonstrated effectiveness for such problems. However, existing methods generate pseudo-labels with massive false positives, because they cannot effectively distinguish sample pairs with the same errors. In this study, we propose a cross-domain animal pose estimation model from a novel perspective of skeleton anomaly learning. We construct a graph contrastive learning mechanism to acquire the skeleton anomaly-aware knowledge, which enables the generation of accurate pseudo-labels for target domain and imposes graph constraint on unlabeled data. And a skeleton anomaly-feedback based domain adaptation framework is designed to facilitate implicit alignment of object-specific features and joint training of cross-domain. Besides, we propose a novel rat pose dataset named UDARP-9.4K to address the gap of small-sized animal pose datasets encompassing diverse experimental scenarios. The related datasets are reviewed and evaluated in detail. Extensive experiments are conducted on UDARP-9.4K and two public datasets to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model in cross-scenarios and cross-species animal pose estimation tasks. Further analysis reveals the effectiveness of the proposed model for skeleton structure feature learning.The UDARP-9.4K dataset is available here.

Channel attention mechanisms endeavor to recalibrate channel weights to enhance representation abilities of networks. However, mainstream methods often rely solely on global average pooling as the feature squeezer, which significantly limits the overall potential of models. In this paper, we investigate the statistical moments of feature maps within a neural network. Our findings highlight the critical role of high-order moments in enhancing model capacity. Consequently, we introduce a flexible and comprehensive mechanism termed Extensive Moment Aggregation (EMA) to capture the global spatial context. Building upon this mechanism, we propose the Moment Channel Attention (MCA) framework, which efficiently incorporates multiple levels of moment-based information while minimizing additional computation costs through our Cross Moment Convolution (CMC) module. The CMC module via channel-wise convolution layer to capture multiple order moment information as well as cross channel features. The MCA block is designed to be lightweight and easily integrated into a variety of neural network architectures. Experimental results on classical image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming existing channel attention methods.

When deep learning is applied to cervical cell screening, it encounters challenges related to the inefficient labeling of data and a shortage of annotators. To mitigate these challenges, this study introduces AL-Annotator, an active learning-based cervical cell annotation system. This system consists of three key components: an interactive interface designed for efficient pathologists’ review, a front-end and back-end separated cervical cell annotation system, and an active learning-based annotation method. Compared to traditional classification-based annotation methods, our annotation system achieves a 17.74% reduction in annotation quantity while improving the accuracy by 1.92%. This annotation system is crucial for developing and testing new machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms for cervical screening, thereby facilitating advancements in diagnostic tools and methodologies.