Gravity-Aware Monocular 3D Human-Object Reconstruction

This paper proposes GraviCap, i.e., a new approach for joint markerless 3D human motion capture and object trajectory estimation from monocular RGB videos. We focus on scenes with objects partially observed during a free flight. In contrast to existing monocular methods, we can recover scale, object trajectories as well as human bone lengths in meters and the ground planes orientation, thanks to the awareness of the gravity constraining object motions. Our objective function is parametrised by the objects initial velocity and position, gravity direction and focal length, and jointly optimised for one or several free flight episodes. The proposed human-object interaction constraints ensure geometric consistency of the 3D reconstructions and improved physical plausibility of human poses compared to the unconstrained case. We evaluate GraviCap on a new dataset with ground-truth annotations for persons and different objects undergoing free flights. In the experiments, our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in 3D human motion capture on various metrics. We urge the reader to watch our supplementary video. Both the source code and the dataset are released; see http://4dqv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/GraviCap/.

HandVoxNet++: 3D Hand Shape and Pose Estimation using Voxel-Based Neural Networks

3D hand shape and pose estimation from a single depth map is a new and challenging computer vision problem with many applications. Existing methods addressing it directly regress hand meshes via 2D convolutional neural networks, which leads to artifacts due to perspective distortions in the images. To address the limitations of the existing methods, we develop HandVoxNet++, i.e., a voxel-based deep network with 3D and graph convolutions trained in a fully supervised manner. The input to our network is a 3D voxelized-depth-map-based on the truncated signed distance function (TSDF). HandVoxNet++ relies on two hand shape representations. The first one is the 3D voxelized grid of hand shape, which does not preserve the mesh topology and which is the most accurate representation. The second representation is the hand surface that preserves the mesh topology. We combine the advantages of both representations by aligning the hand surface to the voxelized hand shape either with a new neural Graph-Convolutions-based Mesh Registration (GCN-MeshReg) or classical segment-wise Non-Rigid Gravitational Approach (NRGA++) which does not rely on training data. In extensive evaluations on three public benchmarks, i.e., SynHand5M, depth-based HANDS19 challenge and HO-3D, the proposed HandVoxNet++ achieves the state-of-the-art performance. In this journal extension of our previous approach presented at CVPR 2020, we gain 41.09% and 13.7% higher shape alignment accuracy on SynHand5M and HANDS19 datasets, respectively. Our method is ranked first on the HANDS19 challenge dataset (Task 1: Depth-Based 3D Hand Pose Estimation) at the moment of the submission of our results to the portal in August 2020.

Fast Simultaneous Gravitational Alignment of Multiple Point Sets

The problem of simultaneous rigid alignment of multiple unordered point sets which is unbiased towards any of the inputs has recently attracted increasing interest, and several reliable methods have been newly proposed. While being remarkably robust towards noise and clustered outliers, current approaches require sophisticated initialisation schemes and do not scale well to large point sets. This paper proposes a new resilient technique for simultaneous registration of multiple point sets by interpreting the latter as particle swarms rigidly moving in the mutually induced force fields. Thanks to the improved simulation with altered physical laws and acceleration of globally multiply-linked point interactions with a 2^D-tree (D is the space dimensionality), our Multi-Body Gravitational Approach (MBGA) is robust to noise and missing data while supporting more massive point sets than previous methods (with 10^5 points and more). In various experimental settings, MBGA is shown to outperform several baseline point set alignment approaches in terms of accuracy and runtime. We make our source code available for the community to facilitate the reproducibility of the results.

Neural Monocular 3D Human Motion Capture with Physical Awareness

We present a new trainable system for physically plausible markerless 3D human motion capture, which achieves state-of-the-art results in a broad range of challenging scenarios. Unlike most neural methods for human motion capture, our approach, which we dub physionical, is aware of physical and environmental constraints. It combines in a fully differentiable way several key innovations, i.e., 1. a proportional-derivative controller, with gains predicted by a neural network, that reduces delays even in the presence of fast motions, 2. an explicit rigid body dynamics model and 3. a novel optimisation layer that prevents physically implausible foot-floor penetration as a hard constraint. The inputs to our system are 2D joint keypoints, which are canonicalised in a novel way so as to reduce the dependency on intrinsic camera parameters -- both at train and test time. This enables more accurate global translation estimation without generalisability loss. Our model can be finetuned only with 2D annotations when the 3D annotations are not available. It produces smooth and physically principled 3D motions in an interactive frame rate in a wide variety of challenging scenes, including newly recorded ones. Its advantages are especially noticeable on in-the-wild sequences that significantly differ from common 3D pose estimation benchmarks such as Human 3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. Qualitative results are available at http://gvv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/PhysAware/

PhysCap: Physically Plausible Monocular 3D Motion Capture in Real Time

Marker-less 3D human motion capture from a single colour camera has seen significant progress. However, it is a very challenging and severely ill-posed problem. In consequence, even the most accurate state-of-the-art approaches have significant limitations. Purely kinematic formulations on the basis of individual joints or skeletons, and the frequent frame-wise reconstruction in state-of-the-art methods greatly limit 3D accuracy and temporal stability compared to multi-view or marker-based motion capture. Further, captured 3D poses are often physically incorrect and biomechanically implausible, or exhibit implausible environment interactions (floor penetration, foot skating, unnatural body leaning and strong shifting in depth), which is problematic for any use case in computer graphics. We, therefore, present PhysCap, the first algorithm for physically plausible, real-time and marker-less human 3D motion capture with a single colour camera at 25 fps. Our algorithm first captures 3D human poses purely kinematically. To this end, a CNN infers 2D and 3D joint positions, and subsequently, an inverse kinematics step finds space-time coherent joint angles and global 3D pose. Next, these kinematic reconstructions are used as constraints in a real-time physics-based pose optimiser that accounts for environment constraints (e.g., collision handling and floor placement), gravity, and biophysical plausibility of human postures. Our approach employs a combination of ground reaction force and residual force for plausible root control, and uses a trained neural network to detect foot contact events in images. Our method captures physically plausible and temporally stable global 3D human motion, without physically implausible postures, floor penetrations or foot skating, from video in real time and in general scenes. The video is available at http://gvv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/PhysCap

DispVoxNets: Non-Rigid Point Set Alignment with Supervised Learning Proxies

We introduce a supervised-learning framework for non-rigid point set alignment of a new kind - Displacements on Voxels Networks (DispVoxNets) - which abstracts away from the point set representation and regresses 3D displacement fields on regularly sampled proxy 3D voxel grids. Thanks to recently released collections of deformable objects with known intra-state correspondences, DispVoxNets learn a deformation model and further priors (e.g., weak point topology preservation) for different object categories such as cloths, human bodies and faces. DispVoxNets cope with large deformations, noise and clustered outliers more robustly than the state-of-the-art. At test time, our approach runs orders of magnitude faster than previous techniques. All properties of DispVoxNets are ascertained numerically and qualitatively in extensive experiments and comparisons to several previous methods.

IsMo-GAN: Adversarial Learning for Monocular Non-Rigid 3D Reconstruction

The majority of the existing methods for non-rigid 3D surface regression from monocular 2D images require an object template or point tracks over multiple frames as an input, and are still far from real-time processing rates. In this work, we present the Isometry-Aware Monocular Generative Adversarial Network (IsMo-GAN) - an approach for direct 3D reconstruction from a single image, trained for the deformation model in an adversarial manner on a light-weight synthetic dataset. IsMo-GAN reconstructs surfaces from real images under varying illumination, camera poses, textures and shading at over 250 Hz. In multiple experiments, it consistently outperforms several approaches in the reconstruction accuracy, runtime, generalisation to unknown surfaces and robustness to occlusions. In comparison to the state-of-the-art, we reduce the reconstruction error by 10-30% including the textureless case and our surfaces evince fewer artefacts qualitatively.

HDM-Net: Monocular Non-Rigid 3D Reconstruction with Learned Deformation Model

Monocular dense 3D reconstruction of deformable objects is a hard ill-posed problem in computer vision. Current techniques either require dense correspondences and rely on motion and deformation cues, or assume a highly accurate reconstruction (referred to as a template) of at least a single frame given in advance and operate in the manner of non-rigid tracking. Accurate computation of dense point tracks often requires multiple frames and might be computationally expensive. Availability of a template is a very strong prior which restricts system operation to a pre-defined environment and scenarios. In this work, we propose a new hybrid approach for monocular non-rigid reconstruction which we call Hybrid Deformation Model Network (HDM-Net). In our approach, deformation model is learned by a deep neural network, with a combination of domain-specific loss functions. We train the network with multiple states of a non-rigidly deforming structure with a known shape at rest. HDM-Net learns different reconstruction cues including texture-dependent surface deformations, shading and contours. We show generalisability of HDM-Net to states not presented in the training dataset, with unseen textures and under new illumination conditions. Experiments with noisy data and a comparison with other methods demonstrate robustness and accuracy of the proposed approach and suggest possible application scenarios of the new technique in interventional diagnostics and augmented reality.