No Arabic abstract
Monocular 3D reconstruction of articulated object categories is challenging due to the lack of training data and the inherent ill-posedness of the problem. In this work we use video self-supervision, forcing the consistency of consecutive 3D reconstructions by a motion-based cycle loss. This largely improves both optimization-based and learning-based 3D mesh reconstruction. We further introduce an interpretable model of 3D template deformations that controls a 3D surface through the displacement of a small number of local, learnable handles. We formulate this operation as a structured layer relying on mesh-laplacian regularization and show that it can be trained in an end-to-end manner. We finally introduce a per-sample numerical optimisation approach that jointly optimises over mesh displacements and cameras within a video, boosting accuracy both for training and also as test time post-processing. While relying exclusively on a small set of videos collected per category for supervision, we obtain state-of-the-art reconstructions with diverse shapes, viewpoints and textures for multiple articulated object categories.
Remarkable progress has been made in 3D reconstruction of rigid structures from a video or a collection of images. However, it is still challenging to reconstruct nonrigid structures from RGB inputs, due to its under-constrained nature. While template-based approaches, such as parametric shape models, have achieved great success in modeling the closed world of known object categories, they cannot well handle the open-world of novel object categories or outlier shapes. In this work, we introduce a template-free approach to learn 3D shapes from a single video. It adopts an analysis-by-synthesis strategy that forward-renders object silhouette, optical flow, and pixel values to compare with video observations, which generates gradients to adjust the camera, shape and motion parameters. Without using a category-specific shape template, our method faithfully reconstructs nonrigid 3D structures from videos of human, animals, and objects of unknown classes. Code will be available at lasr-google.github.io .
We introduce MotioNet, a deep neural network that directly reconstructs the motion of a 3D human skeleton from monocular video.While previous methods rely on either rigging or inverse kinematics (IK) to associate a consistent skeleton with temporally coherent joint rotations, our method is the first data-driven approach that directly outputs a kinematic skeleton, which is a complete, commonly used, motion representation. At the crux of our approach lies a deep neural network with embedded kinematic priors, which decomposes sequences of 2D joint positions into two separate attributes: a single, symmetric, skeleton, encoded by bone lengths, and a sequence of 3D joint rotations associated with global root positions and foot contact labels. These attributes are fed into an integrated forward kinematics (FK) layer that outputs 3D positions, which are compared to a ground truth. In addition, an adversarial loss is applied to the velocities of the recovered rotations, to ensure that they lie on the manifold of natural joint rotations. The key advantage of our approach is that it learns to infer natural joint rotations directly from the training data, rather than assuming an underlying model, or inferring them from joint positions using a data-agnostic IK solver. We show that enforcing a single consistent skeleton along with temporally coherent joint rotations constrains the solution space, leading to a more robust handling of self-occlusions and depth ambiguities.
Recovery of articulated 3D structure from 2D observations is a challenging computer vision problem with many applications. Current learning-based approaches achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on public benchmarks but are restricted to specific types of objects and motions covered by the training datasets. Model-based approaches do not rely on training data but show lower accuracy on these datasets. In this paper, we introduce a model-based method called Structure from Articulated Motion (SfAM), which can recover multiple object and motion types without training on extensive data collections. At the same time, it performs on par with learning-based state-of-the-art approaches on public benchmarks and outperforms previous non-rigid structure from motion (NRSfM) methods. SfAM is built upon a general-purpose NRSfM technique while integrating a soft spatio-temporal constraint on the bone lengths. We use alternating optimization strategy to recover optimal geometry (i.e., bone proportions) together with 3D joint positions by enforcing the bone lengths consistency over a series of frames. SfAM is highly robust to noisy 2D annotations, generalizes to arbitrary objects and does not rely on training data, which is shown in extensive experiments on public benchmarks and real video sequences. We believe that it brings a new perspective on the domain of monocular 3D recovery of articulated structures, including human motion capture.
The increasing availability of video recordings made by multiple cameras has offered new means for mitigating occlusion and depth ambiguities in pose and motion reconstruction methods. Yet, multi-view algorithms strongly depend on camera parameters, in particular, the relative positions among the cameras. Such dependency becomes a hurdle once shifting to dynamic capture in uncontrolled settings. We introduce FLEX (Free muLti-view rEconstruXion), an end-to-end parameter-free multi-view model. FLEX is parameter-free in the sense that it does not require any camera parameters, neither intrinsic nor extrinsic. Our key idea is that the 3D angles between skeletal parts, as well as bone lengths, are invariant to the camera position. Hence, learning 3D rotations and bone lengths rather than locations allows predicting common values for all camera views. Our network takes multiple video streams, learns fused deep features through a novel multi-view fusion layer, and reconstructs a single consistent skeleton with temporally coherent joint rotations. We demonstrate quantitative and qualitative results on the Human3.6M and KTH Multi-view Football II datasets. We compare our model to state-of-the-art methods that are not parameter-free and show that in the absence of camera parameters, we outperform them by a large margin while obtaining comparable results when camera parameters are available. Code, trained models, video demonstration, and additional materials will be available on our project page.
Video-based human motion transfer creates video animations of humans following a source motion. Current methods show remarkable results for tightly-clad subjects. However, the lack of temporally consistent handling of plausible clothing dynamics, including fine and high-frequency details, significantly limits the attainable visual quality. We address these limitations for the first time in the literature and present a new framework which performs high-fidelity and temporally-consistent human motion transfer with natural pose-dependent non-rigid deformations, for several types of loose garments. In contrast to the previous techniques, we perform image generation in three subsequent stages, synthesizing human shape, structure, and appearance. Given a monocular RGB video of an actor, we train a stack of recurrent deep neural networks that generate these intermediate representations from 2D poses and their temporal derivatives. Splitting the difficult motion transfer problem into subtasks that are aware of the temporal motion context helps us to synthesize results with plausible dynamics and pose-dependent detail. It also allows artistic control of results by manipulation of individual framework stages. In the experimental results, we significantly outperform the state-of-the-art in terms of video realism. Our code and data will be made publicly available.