A common problem in the 4D reconstruction of people from multi-view video is the quality of the captured dynamic texture appearance which depends on both the camera resolution and capture volume. Typically the requirement to frame cameras to capture
the volume of a dynamic performance ($>50m^3$) results in the person occupying only a small proportion $<$ 10% of the field of view. Even with ultra high-definition 4k video acquisition this results in sampling the person at less-than standard definition 0.5k video resolution resulting in low-quality rendering. In this paper we propose a solution to this problem through super-resolution appearance transfer from a static high-resolution appearance capture rig using digital stills cameras ($> 8k$) to capture the person in a small volume ($<8m^3$). A pipeline is proposed for super-resolution appearance transfer from high-resolution static capture to dynamic video performance capture to produce super-resolution dynamic textures. This addresses two key problems: colour mapping between different camera systems; and dynamic texture map super-resolution using a learnt model. Comparative evaluation demonstrates a significant qualitative and quantitative improvement in rendering the 4D performance capture with super-resolution dynamic texture appearance. The proposed approach reproduces the high-resolution detail of the static capture whilst maintaining the appearance dynamics of the captured video.
This paper proposes a novel Attention-based Multi-Reference Super-resolution network (AMRSR) that, given a low-resolution image, learns to adaptively transfer the most similar texture from multiple reference images to the super-resolution output whil
st maintaining spatial coherence. The use of multiple reference images together with attention-based sampling is demonstrated to achieve significantly improved performance over state-of-the-art reference super-resolution approaches on multiple benchmark datasets. Reference super-resolution approaches have recently been proposed to overcome the ill-posed problem of image super-resolution by providing additional information from a high-resolution reference image. Multi-reference super-resolution extends this approach by providing a more diverse pool of image features to overcome the inherent information deficit whilst maintaining memory efficiency. A novel hierarchical attention-based sampling approach is introduced to learn the similarity between low-resolution image features and multiple reference images based on a perceptual loss. Ablation demonstrates the contribution of both multi-reference and hierarchical attention-based sampling to overall performance. Perceptual and quantitative ground-truth evaluation demonstrates significant improvement in performance even when the reference images deviate significantly from the target image. The project website can be found at https://marcopesavento.github.io/AMRSR/
Estimating the pose of animals can facilitate the understanding of animal motion which is fundamental in disciplines such as biomechanics, neuroscience, ethology, robotics and the entertainment industry. Human pose estimation models have achieved hig
h performance due to the huge amount of training data available. Achieving the same results for animal pose estimation is challenging due to the lack of animal pose datasets. To address this problem we introduce SyDog: a synthetic dataset of dogs containing ground truth pose and bounding box coordinates which was generated using the game engine, Unity. We demonstrate that pose estimation models trained on SyDog achieve better performance than models trained purely on real data and significantly reduce the need for the labour intensive labelling of images. We release the SyDog dataset as a training and evaluation benchmark for research in animal motion.
We present a novel method to learn temporally consistent 3D reconstruction of clothed people from a monocular video. Recent methods for 3D human reconstruction from monocular video using volumetric, implicit or parametric human shape models, produce
per frame reconstructions giving temporally inconsistent output and limited performance when applied to video. In this paper, we introduce an approach to learn temporally consistent features for textured reconstruction of clothed 3D human sequences from monocular video by proposing two advances: a novel temporal consistency loss function; and hybrid representation learning for implicit 3D reconstruction from 2D images and coarse 3D geometry. The proposed advances improve the temporal consistency and accuracy of both the 3D reconstruction and texture prediction from a monocular video. Comprehensive comparative performance evaluation on images of people demonstrates that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art learning-based single image 3D human shape estimation approaches achieving significant improvement of reconstruction accuracy, completeness, quality and temporal consistency.
We aim to simultaneously estimate the 3D articulated pose and high fidelity volumetric occupancy of human performance, from multiple viewpoint video (MVV) with as few as two views. We use a multi-channel symmetric 3D convolutional encoder-decoder wit
h a dual loss to enforce the learning of a latent embedding that enables inference of skeletal joint positions and a volumetric reconstruction of the performance. The inference is regularised via a prior learned over a dataset of view-ablated multi-view video footage of a wide range of subjects and actions, and show this to generalise well across unseen subjects and actions. We demonstrate improved reconstruction accuracy and lower pose estimation error relative to prior work on two MVV performance capture datasets: Human 3.6M and TotalCapture.
We introduce the first approach to solve the challenging problem of unsupervised 4D visual scene understanding for complex dynamic scenes with multiple interacting people from multi-view video. Our approach simultaneously estimates a detailed model t
hat includes a per-pixel semantically and temporally coherent reconstruction, together with instance-level segmentation exploiting photo-consistency, semantic and motion information. We further leverage recent advances in 3D pose estimation to constrain the joint semantic instance segmentation and 4D temporally coherent reconstruction. This enables per person semantic instance segmentation of multiple interacting people in complex dynamic scenes. Extensive evaluation of the joint visual scene understanding framework against state-of-the-art methods on challenging indoor and outdoor sequences demonstrates a significant (approx 40%) improvement in semantic segmentation, reconstruction and scene flow accuracy.
We present a method for simultaneously estimating 3D human pose and body shape from a sparse set of wide-baseline camera views. We train a symmetric convolutional autoencoder with a dual loss that enforces learning of a latent representation that enc
odes skeletal joint positions, and at the same time learns a deep representation of volumetric body shape. We harness the latter to up-scale input volumetric data by a factor of $4 times$, whilst recovering a 3D estimate of joint positions with equal or greater accuracy than the state of the art. Inference runs in real-time (25 fps) and has the potential for passive human behaviour monitoring where there is a requirement for high fidelity estimation of human body shape and pose.
