Estimates of migratory waterbirds population provide the essential scientific basis to guide the conservation of coastal wetlands, which are heavily modified and threatened by economic development. New equipment and technology have been increasingly introduced in protected areas to expand the monitoring efforts, among which video surveillance and other unmanned devices are widely used in coastal wetlands. However, the massive amount of video records brings the dual challenge of storage and analysis. Manual analysis methods are time-consuming and error-prone, representing a significant bottleneck to rapid data processing and dissemination and application of results. Recently, video processing with deep learning has emerged as a solution, but its ability to accurately identify and count waterbirds across habitat types (e.g., mudflat, saltmarsh, and open water) is untested in coastal environments. In this study, we developed a two-step automatic waterbird monitoring framework. The first step involves automatic video segmentation, selection, processing, and mosaicking video footages into panorama images covering the entire monitoring area, which are subjected to the second step of counting and density estimation using a depth density estimation network (DDE). We tested the effectiveness and performance of the framework in Tiaozini, Jiangsu Province, China, which is a restored wetland, providing key high-tide roosting ground for migratory waterbirds in the East Asian–Australasian flyway. The results showed that our approach achieved an accuracy of 85.59%, outperforming many other popular deep learning algorithms. Furthermore, the standard error of our model was very small (se = 0.0004), suggesting the high stability of the method. The framework is computing effective—it takes about one minute to process a theme covering the entire site using a high-performance desktop computer. These results demonstrate that our framework can extract ecologically meaningful data and information from video surveillance footages accurately to assist biodiversity monitoring, fulfilling the gap in the efficient use of existing monitoring equipment deployed in protected areas.

3D human pose estimation is a major focus area in the field of computer vision, which plays an important role in practical applications. This article summarizes the framework and research progress related to the estimation of monocular RGB images and videos. An overall perspective of methods integrated with deep learning is introduced. Novel image-based and video-based inputs are proposed as the analysis framework. From this viewpoint, common problems are discussed. The diversity of human postures usually leads to problems such as occlusion and ambiguity, and the lack of training datasets often results in poor generalization ability of the model. Regression methods are crucial for solving such problems. Considering image-based input, the multi-view method is commonly used to solve occlusion problems. Here, the multi-view method is analyzed comprehensively. By referring to video-based input, the human prior knowledge of restricted motion is used to predict human postures. In addition, structural constraints are widely used as prior knowledge. Furthermore, weakly supervised learning methods are studied and discussed for these two types of inputs to improve the model generalization ability. The problem of insufficient training datasets must also be considered, especially because 3D datasets are usually biased and limited. Finally, emerging and popular datasets and evaluation indicators are discussed. The characteristics of the datasets and the relationships of the indicators are explained and highlighted. Thus, this article can be useful and instructive for researchers who are lacking in experience and find this field confusing. In addition, by providing an overview of 3D human pose estimation, this article sorts and refines recent studies on 3D human pose estimation. It describes kernel problems and common useful methods, and discusses the scope for further research.