No Arabic abstract
Hand pose estimation is difficult due to different environmental conditions, object- and self-occlusion as well as diversity in hand shape and appearance. Exhaustively covering this wide range of factors in fully annotated datasets has remained impractical, posing significant challenges for generalization of supervised methods. Embracing this challenge, we propose to combine ideas from adversarial training and motion modelling to tap into unlabeled videos. To this end we propose what to the best of our knowledge is the first motion model for hands and show that an adversarial formulation leads to better generalization properties of the hand pose estimator via semi-supervised training on unlabeled video sequences. In this setting, the pose predictor must produce a valid sequence of hand poses, as determined by a discriminative adversary. This adversary reasons both on the structural as well as temporal domain, effectively exploiting the spatio-temporal structure in the task. The main advantage of our approach is that we can make use of unpaired videos and joint sequence data both of which are much easier to attain than paired training data. We perform extensive evaluation, investigating essential components needed for the proposed framework and empirically demonstrate in two challenging settings that the proposed approach leads to significant improvements in pose estimation accuracy. In the lowest label setting, we attain an improvement of $40%$ in absolute mean joint error.
3D hand-object pose estimation is an important issue to understand the interaction between human and environment. Current hand-object pose estimation methods require detailed 3D labels, which are expensive and labor-intensive. To tackle the problem of data collection, we propose a semi-supervised 3D hand-object pose estimation method with two key techniques: pose dictionary learning and an object-oriented coordinate system. The proposed pose dictionary learning module can distinguish infeasible poses by reconstruction error, enabling unlabeled data to provide supervision signals. The proposed object-oriented coordinate system can make 3D estimations equivariant to the camera perspective. Experiments are conducted on FPHA and HO-3D datasets. Our method reduces estimation error by 19.5% / 24.9% for hands/objects compared to straightforward use of labeled data on FPHA and outperforms several baseline methods. Extensive experiments also validate the robustness of the proposed method.
Estimating 3D hand pose from 2D images is a difficult, inverse problem due to the inherent scale and depth ambiguities. Current state-of-the-art methods train fully supervised deep neural networks with 3D ground-truth data. However, acquiring 3D annotations is expensive, typically requiring calibrated multi-view setups or labor intensive manual annotations. While annotations of 2D keypoints are much easier to obtain, how to efficiently leverage such weakly-supervised data to improve the task of 3D hand pose prediction remains an important open question. The key difficulty stems from the fact that direct application of additional 2D supervision mostly benefits the 2D proxy objective but does little to alleviate the depth and scale ambiguities. Embracing this challenge we propose a set of novel losses. We show by extensive experiments that our proposed constraints significantly reduce the depth ambiguity and allow the network to more effectively leverage additional 2D annotated images. For example, on the challenging freiHAND dataset using additional 2D annotation without our proposed biomechanical constraints reduces the depth error by only $15%$, whereas the error is reduced significantly by $50%$ when the proposed biomechanical constraints are used.
In this paper, we address the problem of monocular depth estimation when only a limited number of training image-depth pairs are available. To achieve a high regression accuracy, the state-of-the-art estimation methods rely on CNNs trained with a large number of image-depth pairs, which are prohibitively costly or even infeasible to acquire. Aiming to break the curse of such expensive data collections, we propose a semi-supervised adversarial learning framework that only utilizes a small number of image-depth pairs in conjunction with a large number of easily-available monocular images to achieve high performance. In particular, we use one generator to regress the depth and two discriminators to evaluate the predicted depth , i.e., one inspects the image-depth pair while the other inspects the depth channel alone. These two discriminators provide their feedbacks to the generator as the loss to generate more realistic and accurate depth predictions. Experiments show that the proposed approach can (1) improve most state-of-the-art models on the NYUD v2 dataset by effectively leveraging additional unlabeled data sources; (2) reach state-of-the-art accuracy when the training set is small, e.g., on the Make3D dataset; (3) adapt well to an unseen new dataset (Make3D in our case) after training on an annotated dataset (KITTI in our case).
Human motion prediction is a challenging and important task in many computer vision application domains. Existing work only implicitly models the spatial structure of the human skeleton. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that decomposes the prediction into individual joints by means of a structured prediction layer that explicitly models the joint dependencies. This is implemented via a hierarchy of small-sized neural networks connected analogously to the kinematic chains in the human body as well as a joint-wise decomposition in the loss function. The proposed layer is agnostic to the underlying network and can be used with existing architectures for motion modelling. Prior work typically leverages the H3.6M dataset. We show that some state-of-the-art techniques do not perform well when trained and tested on AMASS, a recently released dataset 14 times the size of H3.6M. Our experiments indicate that the proposed layer increases the performance of motion forecasting irrespective of the base network, joint-angle representation, and prediction horizon. We furthermore show that the layer also improves motion predictions qualitatively. We make code and models publicly available at https://ait.ethz.ch/projects/2019/spl.
Insufficient labeled training datasets is one of the bottlenecks of 3D hand pose estimation from monocular RGB images. Synthetic datasets have a large number of images with precise annotations, but the obvious difference with real-world datasets impacts the generalization. Little work has been done to bridge the gap between two domains over their wide difference. In this paper, we propose a domain adaptation method called Adaptive Wasserstein Hourglass (AW Hourglass) for weakly-supervised 3D hand pose estimation, which aims to distinguish the difference and explore the common characteristics (e.g. hand structure) of synthetic and real-world datasets. Learning the common characteristics helps the network focus on pose-related information. The similarity of the characteristics makes it easier to enforce domain-invariant constraints. During training, based on the relation between these common characteristics and 3D pose learned from fully-annotated synthetic datasets, it is beneficial for the network to restore the 3D pose of weakly labeled real-world datasets with the aid of 2D annotations and depth images. While in testing, the network predicts the 3D pose with the input of RGB.