The synthesis of human grasping has numerous applications including AR/VR, video games and robotics. While methods have been proposed to generate realistic hand-object interaction for object grasping and manipulation, these typically only consider interacting hand alone. Our goal is to synthesize whole-body grasping motions. Starting from an arbitrary initial pose, we aim to generate diverse and natural whole-body human motions to approach and grasp a target object in 3D space. This task is challenging as it requires modeling both whole-body dynamics and dexterous finger movements. To this end, we propose SAGA (StochAstic whole-body Grasping with contAct), a framework which consists of two key components: (a) Static whole-body grasping pose generation. Specifically, we propose a multi-task generative model, to jointly learn static whole-body grasping poses and human-object contacts. (b) Grasping motion infilling. Given an initial pose and the generated whole-body grasping pose as the start and end of the motion respectively, we design a novel contact-aware generative motion infilling module to generate a diverse set of grasp-oriented motions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which is a novel generative framework to synthesize realistic and expressive whole-body motions that approach and grasp randomly placed unseen objects. Code and models are available at https://jiahaoplus.github.io/SAGA/saga.html.
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Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) is a popular objective function in sequence recognition, which provides supervision for unsegmented sequence data through aligning sequence and its corresponding labeling iteratively. The blank class of CTC plays a crucial role in the alignment process and is often considered responsible for the peaky behavior of CTC. In this study, we propose an objective function named RadialCTC that constrains sequence features on a hypersphere while retaining the iterative alignment mechanism of CTC. The learned features of each non-blank class are distributed on a radial arc from the center of the blank class, which provides a clear geometric interpretation and makes the alignment process more efficient. Besides, RadialCTC can control the peaky behavior by simply modifying the logit of the blank class. Experimental results of recognition and localization demonstrate the effectiveness of RadialCTC on two sequence recognition applications.
Neural fields such as implicit surfaces have recently enabled avatar modeling from raw scans without explicit temporal correspondences. In this work, we exploit autoregressive modeling to further extend this notion to capture dynamic effects, such as soft-tissue deformations. Although autoregressive models are naturally capable of handling dynamics, it is non-trivial to apply them to implicit representations, as explicit state decoding is infeasible due to prohibitive memory requirements. In this work, for the first time, we enable autoregressive modeling of implicit avatars. To reduce the memory bottleneck and efficiently model dynamic implicit surfaces, we introduce the notion of articulated observer points, which relate implicit states to the explicit surface of a parametric human body model. We demonstrate that encoding implicit surfaces as a set of height fields defined on articulated observer points leads to significantly better generalization compared to a latent representation. The experiments show that our approach outperforms the state of the art, achieving plausible dynamic deformations even for unseen motions. https://zqbai-jeremy.github.io/autoavatar
The study of hand-object interaction requires generating viable grasp poses for high-dimensional multi-finger models, often relying on analytic grasp synthesis which tends to produce brittle and unnatural results. This paper presents Grasp’D, an approach to grasp synthesis by differentiable contact simulation that can work with both known models and visual inputs. We use gradient-based methods as an alternative to sampling-based grasp synthesis, which fails without simplifying assumptions, such as pre-specified contact locations and eigengrasps. Such assumptions limit grasp discovery and, in particular, exclude high-contact power grasps. In contrast, our simulation-based approach allows for stable, efficient, physically realistic, high-contact grasp synthesis, even for gripper morphologies with high-degrees of freedom. We identify and address challenges in making grasp simulation amenable to gradient-based optimization, such as non-smooth object surface geometry, contact sparsity, and a rugged optimization landscape. Grasp’D compares favorably to analytic grasp synthesis on human and robotic hand models, and resultant grasps achieve over 4× denser contact, leading to significantly higher grasp stability. Video and code available at: graspd-eccv22.github.io.
Understanding social interactions from egocentric views is crucial for many applications, ranging from assistive robotics to AR/VR. Key to reasoning about interactions is to understand the body pose and motion of the interaction partner from the egocentric view. However, research in this area is severely hindered by the lack of datasets. Existing datasets are limited in terms of either size, capture/annotation modalities, ground-truth quality, or interaction diversity. We fill this gap by proposing EgoBody, a novel large-scale dataset for human pose, shape and motion estimation from egocentric views, during interactions in complex 3D scenes. We employ Microsoft HoloLens2 headsets to record rich egocentric data streams (including RGB, depth, eye gaze, head and hand tracking). To obtain accurate 3D ground truth, we calibrate the headset with a multi-Kinect rig and fit expressive SMPL-X body meshes to multi-view RGB-D frames, reconstructing 3D human shapes and poses relative to the scene, over time. We collect 68 sequences, spanning diverse interaction scenarios, and propose the first benchmark for 3D full-body pose and shape estimation of the social partner from egocentric views. We extensively evaluate state-of-the-art methods, highlight their limitations in the egocentric scenario, and address such limitations leveraging our high-quality annotations. Data and code will be available for research purposes.
Fitting parametric models of human bodies, hands or faces to sparse input signals in an accurate, robust, and fast manner has the promise of significantly improving immersion in AR and VR scenarios. A common first step in systems that tackle these problems is to regress the parameters of the parametric model directly from the input data. This approach is fast, robust, and is a good starting point for an iterative minimization algorithm. The latter searches for the minimum of an energy function, typically composed of a data term and priors that encode our knowledge about the problem’s structure. While this is undoubtedly a very successful recipe, priors are often hand defined heuristics and finding the right balance between the different terms to achieve high quality results is a non-trivial task. Furthermore, converting and optimizing these systems to run in a performant way requires custom implementations that demand significant time investments from both engineers and domain experts. In this work, we build upon recent advances in learned optimization and propose an update rule inspired by the classic Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. We show the effectiveness of the proposed neural optimizer on three problems, 3D body estimation from a head-mounted device, 3D body estimation from sparse 2D keypoints and face surface estimation from dense 2D landmarks. Our method can easily be applied to new model fitting problems and offers a competitive alternative to well-tuned ‘traditional’ model fitting pipelines, both in terms of accuracy and speed.
While the voxel-based methods have achieved promising results for multi-person 3D pose estimation from multi-cameras, they suffer from heavy computation burdens, especially for large scenes. We present Faster VoxelPose to address the challenge by re-projecting the feature volume to the three two-dimensional coordinate planes and estimating X, Y, Z coordinates from them separately. To that end, we first localize each person by a 3D bounding box by estimating a 2D box and its height based on the volume features projected to the xy-plane and z-axis, respectively. Then for each person, we estimate partial joint coordinates from the three coordinate planes separately which are then fused to obtain the final 3D pose. The method is free from costly 3D-CNNs and improves the speed of VoxelPose by ten times and meanwhile achieves competitive accuracy as the state-of-the-art methods, proving its potential in real-time applications.
This paper studies category-level object pose estimation based on a single monocular image. Recent advances in pose-aware generative models have paved the way for addressing this challenging task using analysis-by-synthesis. The idea is to sequentially update a set of latent variables,e.g., pose, shape, and appearance, of the generative model until the generated image best agrees with the observation. However, convergence and efficiency are two challenges of this inference procedure. In this paper, we take a deeper look at the inference of analysis-by-synthesis from the perspective of visual navigation, and investigate what is a good navigation policy for this specific task. We evaluate three different strategies, including gradient descent, reinforcement learning and imitation learning, via thorough comparisons in terms of convergence, robustness and efficiency. Moreover, we show that a simple hybrid approach leads to an effective and efficient solution. We further compare these strategies to state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrate superior performance on synthetic and real-world datasets leveraging off-the-shelf pose-aware generative models.
The embedding-based method such as Associative Embedding is popular in bottom-up human pose estimation. Methods under this framework group candidate keypoints according to the predicted identity embeddings. However, the identity embeddings of different instances are likely to be linearly inseparable in some complex scenes, such as crowded scene or when the number of instances in the image is large. To reduce the impact of this phenomenon on keypoint grouping, we try to learn a sparse multidimensional embedding for each keypoint. We observe that the different dimensions of embeddings are highly linearly correlated. To address this issue, we impose an additional constraint on the embeddings during training phase. Based on the fact that the scales of instances usually have significant variations, we uilize the scales of instances to regularize the embeddings, which effectively reduces the linear correlation of embeddings and makes embeddings being sparse. We evaluate our model on CrowdPose Test and COCO Test-dev. Compared to vanilla Associative Embedding, our method has an impressive superiority in keypoint grouping, especially in crowded scenes with a large number of instances. Furthermore, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on CrowdPose Test (74.5 AP) and COCO Test-dev (72.8 AP), outperforming other bottom-up methods. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/CR320/CoupledEmbedding.
The 2D heatmap-based approaches have dominated Human Pose Estimation (HPE) for years due to high performance. However, the long-standing quantization error problem in the 2D heatmap-based methods leads to several well-known drawbacks: 1) The performance for the low-resolution inputs is limited; 2) To improve the feature map resolution for higher localization precision, multiple costly upsampling layers are required; 3) Extra post-processing is adopted to reduce the quantization error. To address these issues, we aim to explore a brand new scheme, called SimCC, which reformulates HPE as two classification tasks for horizontal and vertical coordinates. The proposed SimCC uniformly divides each pixel into several bins, thus achieving sub-pixel localization precision and low quantization error. Benefiting from that, SimCC can omit additional refinement post-processing and exclude upsampling layers under certain settings, resulting in a more simple and effective pipeline for HPE. Extensive experiments conducted over COCO, CrowdPose, and MPII datasets show that SimCC outperforms heatmap-based counterparts, especially in low-resolution settings by a large margin. Code is now publicly available at https://github.com/leeyegy/SimCC.
We propose a direct, regression-based approach to 2D human pose estimation from single images. We formulate the problem as a sequence prediction task, which we solve using a Transformer network. This network directly learns a regression mapping from images to the keypoint coordinates, without resorting to intermediate representations such as heatmaps. This approach avoids much of the complexity associated with heatmap-based approaches. To overcome the feature misalignment issues of previous regression-based methods, we propose an attention mechanism that adaptively attends to the features that are most relevant to the target keypoints, considerably improving the accuracy. Importantly, our framework is end-to-end differentiable, and naturally learns to exploit the dependencies between keypoints. Experiments on MS-COCO and MPII, two predominant pose-estimation datasets, demonstrate that our method significantly improves upon the state-of-the-art in regression-based pose estimation. More notably, ours is the first regression-based approach to perform favorably compared to the best heatmap-based pose estimation methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/aim-uofa/Poseur
While monocular 3D pose estimation seems to have achieved very accurate results on the public datasets, their generalization ability is largely overlooked. In this work, we perform a systematic evaluation of the existing methods and find that they get notably larger errors when tested on different cameras, human poses and appearance. To address the problem, we introduce VirtualPose, a two-stage learning framework to exploit the hidden ""free lunch"" specific to this task, i.e. generating infinite number of poses and cameras for training models at no cost. To that end, the first stage transforms images to abstract geometry representations (AGR), and then the second maps them to 3D poses. It addresses the generalization issue from two aspects: (1) the first stage can be trained on diverse 2D datasets to reduce the risk of over-fitting to limited appearance; (2) the second stage can be trained on diverse AGR synthesized from a large number of virtual cameras and poses. It outperforms the SOTA methods without using any paired images and 3D poses from the benchmarks, which paves the way for practical applications. Code is available at https://github.com/wkom/VirtualPose.
Rethinking Keypoint Representations: Modeling Keypoints and Poses as Objects for Multi-Person Human Pose Estimation
PDF ↗In keypoint estimation tasks such as human pose estimation, heatmap-based regression is the dominant approach despite possessing notable drawbacks: heatmaps intrinsically suffer from quantization error and require excessive computation to generate and post-process. Motivated to find a more efficient solution, we propose to model individual keypoints and sets of spatially related keypoints (i.e., poses) as objects within a dense single-stage anchor-based detection framework. Hence, we call our method KAPAO (pronounced ""Ka-Pow""), for Keypoints And Poses As Objects. KAPAO is applied to the problem of single-stage multi-person human pose estimation by simultaneously detecting human pose and keypoint objects and fusing the detections to exploit the strengths of both object representations. In experiments, we observe that KAPAO is faster and more accurate than previous methods, which suffer greatly from heatmap post-processing. The accuracy-speed trade-off is especially favourable in the practical setting when not using test-time augmentation. Source code: https://github.com/wmcnally/kapao.
Graph convolutional network based methods that model the body joints’ relations, have recently shown great promise in 3D skeleton-based human motion prediction. However, these methods have two critical issues: first, deep graph convolutions filter features within only limited graph spectrum band, losing sufficient information in the full band; second, using a single graph to model the whole body underestimates the diverse patterns in various body-parts. To address the first issue, we propose adaptive graph scattering, which leverages multiple trainable band-pass graph filters to decompose pose features into various graph spectrum bands to provide richer information, promoting more comprehensive feature extraction. To address the second issue, body parts are modeled separately to learn diverse dynamics, which enables finer feature extraction along the spatial dimensions. Integrating the above two designs, we propose a novel skeleton-parted graph scattering network (SPGSN). The cores of the model are cascaded multi-part graph scattering blocks (MPGSBs), which build adaptive graph scattering for large-band graph filtering on diverse body-parts, as well as fuse the decomposed features based on the inferred spectrum importance and body-part interactions. Extensive experiments have shown that SPGSN outperforms state-of-the-art methods by remarkable margins of 13.8%, 9.3% and 2.7% in terms of 3D mean per joint position error (MPJPE) on Human3.6M, CMU Mocap and 3DPW datasets, respectively.
We present UnrealEgo, a new large-scale naturalistic dataset for egocentric 3D human pose estimation. UnrealEgo is based on an advanced concept of eyeglasses equipped with two fisheye cameras that can be used in unconstrained environments. We design their virtual prototype and attach them to 3D human models for stereo view capture. We next generate a large corpus of human motions. As a consequence, UnrealEgo is the first dataset to provide in-the-wild stereo images with the largest variety of motions among existing egocentric datasets. Furthermore, we propose a new benchmark method with a simple but effective idea of devising a 2D keypoint estimation module for stereo inputs to improve 3D human pose estimation. The extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods qualitatively and quantitatively. UnrealEgo and our source codes are available on our project web page.
We observe that human poses exhibit strong group-wise structural correlation and spatial coupling between keypoints due to the biological constraints of different body parts. This group-wise structural correlation can be explored to improve the accuracy and robustness of human pose estimation. In this work, we develop a self-constrained prediction-verification network to characterize and learn the structural correlation between keypoints during training. During the inference stage, the feedback information from the verification network allows us to perform further optimization of pose prediction, which significantly improves the performance of human pose estimation. Specifically, we partition the keypoints into groups according to the biological structure of human body. Within each group, the keypoints are further partitioned into two subsets, high-confidence base keypoints and low-confidence terminal keypoints. We develop a self-constrained prediction-verification network to perform forward and backward predictions between these keypoint subsets. One fundamental challenge in pose estimation, as well as in generic prediction tasks, is that there is no mechanism for us to verify if the obtained pose estimation or prediction results are accurate or not, since the ground truth is not available. Once successfully learned, the verification network serves as an accuracy verification module for the forward pose prediction. During the inference stage, it can be used to guide the local optimization of the pose estimation results of low-confidence keypoints with the self-constrained loss on high-confidence keypoints as the objective function. Our extensive experimental results on benchmark MS COCO and CrowdPose datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly improve the pose estimation results.
Generating stylized audio-driven gestures for robots and virtual avatars has attracted increasing considerations recently. Existing methods require style labels (e.g. speaker identities), or complex preprocessing of the data to obtain style control parameters. In this paper, we propose a new end-to-end flow-based model, which can generate audio-driven gestures of arbitrary styles without the preprocessing procedure and style labels. To achieve this goal, we introduce a global encoder and a gesture perceptual loss into the classic generative flow model to capture both the global and local information. We conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets: the TED Dataset and the Trinity Dataset. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models.
We propose Structural Triangulation, a closed-form solution for optimal 3D human pose considering multi-view 2D pose estimations, calibrated camera parameters, and bone lengths. To start with, we focus on embedding structural constraints of human body in the process of 2D-to-3D inference using triangulation. Assume bone lengths are known in prior, then the inference process is formulated as a constrained optimization problem. By proper approximation, the closed-form solution to this problem is achieved. Further, we generalize our method with Step Constraint Algorithm to help converge when large error occurs in 2D estimations. In experiment, public datasets (Human3.6M and Total Capture) and synthesized data are used for evaluation. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on Human3.6M Dataset when bone lengths are known and competitive results when they are not. The generality and efficiency of our method are also demonstrated.
Overlooked Poses Actually Make Sense: Distilling Privileged Knowledge for Human Motion Prediction
PDF ↗Previous works on human motion prediction follow the pattern of building a mapping relation between the sequence observed and the one to be predicted. However, due to the inherent complexity of multivariate time series data, it still remains a challenge to find the extrapolation relation between motion sequences. In this paper, we present a new prediction pattern, which introduces previously overlooked human poses, to implement the prediction task from the view of interpolation. These poses exist after the predicted sequence, and form the privileged sequence. To be specific, we first propose an InTerPolation learning Network (ITP-Network) that encodes both the observed sequence and the privileged sequence to interpolate the in-between predicted sequence, wherein the embedded Privileged-sequence-Encoder (Priv-Encoder) learns the privileged knowledge (PK) simultaneously. Then, we propose a Final Prediction Network (FP-Network) for which the privileged sequence is not observable, but is equipped with a novel PK-Simulator that distills PK learned from the previous network. This simulator takes as input the observed sequence, but approximates the behavior of Priv-Encoder, enabling FP-Network to imitate the interpolation process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our prediction pattern achieves state-of the-art performance on benchmarked H3.6M, CMU-Mocap and 3DPW datasets in both short-term and long-term predictions.
Estimating 3D poses and shapes in the form of meshes from monocular RGB images is challenging. Obviously, it is more difficult than estimating 3D poses only in the form of skeletons or heatmaps. When interacting persons are involved, the 3D mesh reconstruction becomes more challenging due to the ambiguity introduced by person-to-person occlusions. To tackle the challenges, we propose a coarse-to-fine pipeline that benefits from 1) inverse kinematics from the occlusion-robust 3D skeleton estimation and 2) transformer-based relation-aware refinement techniques. In our pipeline, we first obtain occlusion-robust 3D skeletons for multiple persons from an RGB image. Then, we apply inverse kinematics to convert the estimated skeletons to deformable 3D mesh parameters. Finally, we apply the transformer-based mesh refinement that refines the obtained mesh parameters considering intra- and inter-person relations of 3D meshes. Via extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, outperforming state-of-the-arts on 3DPW, MuPoTS and AGORA datasets.