479 research outputs found
Hierarchical Cross-Modal Talking Face Generationwith Dynamic Pixel-Wise Loss
We devise a cascade GAN approach to generate talking face video, which is
robust to different face shapes, view angles, facial characteristics, and noisy
audio conditions. Instead of learning a direct mapping from audio to video
frames, we propose first to transfer audio to high-level structure, i.e., the
facial landmarks, and then to generate video frames conditioned on the
landmarks. Compared to a direct audio-to-image approach, our cascade approach
avoids fitting spurious correlations between audiovisual signals that are
irrelevant to the speech content. We, humans, are sensitive to temporal
discontinuities and subtle artifacts in video. To avoid those pixel jittering
problems and to enforce the network to focus on audiovisual-correlated regions,
we propose a novel dynamically adjustable pixel-wise loss with an attention
mechanism. Furthermore, to generate a sharper image with well-synchronized
facial movements, we propose a novel regression-based discriminator structure,
which considers sequence-level information along with frame-level information.
Thoughtful experiments on several datasets and real-world samples demonstrate
significantly better results obtained by our method than the state-of-the-art
methods in both quantitative and qualitative comparisons
Alternative visual units for an optimized phoneme-based lipreading system
Lipreading is understanding speech from observed lip movements. An observed series of lip motions is an ordered sequence of visual lip gestures. These gestures are commonly known, but as yet are not formally defined, as `visemes’. In this article, we describe a structured approach which allows us to create speaker-dependent visemes with a fixed number of visemes within each set. We create sets of visemes for sizes two to 45. Each set of visemes is based upon clustering phonemes, thus each set has a unique phoneme-to-viseme mapping. We first present an experiment using these maps and the Resource Management Audio-Visual (RMAV) dataset which shows the effect of changing the viseme map size in speaker-dependent machine lipreading and demonstrate that word recognition with phoneme classifiers is possible. Furthermore, we show that there are intermediate units between visemes and phonemes which are better still. Second, we present a novel two-pass training scheme for phoneme classifiers. This approach uses our new intermediary visual units from our first experiment in the first pass as classifiers; before using the phoneme-to-viseme maps, we retrain these into phoneme classifiers. This method significantly improves on previous lipreading results with RMAV speakers
Registration Combining Wide and Narrow Baseline Feature Tracking Techniques for Markerless AR Systems
Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real world and computer generated data. Registration is one of the most difficult problems currently limiting the usability of AR systems. In this paper, we propose a novel natural feature tracking based registration method for AR applications. The proposed method has following advantages: (1) it is simple and efficient, as no man-made markers are needed for both indoor and outdoor AR applications; moreover, it can work with arbitrary geometric shapes including planar, near planar and non planar structures which really enhance the usability of AR systems. (2) Thanks to the reduced SIFT based augmented optical flow tracker, the virtual scene can still be augmented on the specified areas even under the circumstances of occlusion and large changes in viewpoint during the entire process. (3) It is easy to use, because the adaptive classification tree based matching strategy can give us fast and accurate initialization, even when the initial camera is different from the reference image to a large degree. Experimental evaluations validate the performance of the proposed method for online pose tracking and augmentation
A Comprehensive Performance Evaluation of Deformable Face Tracking "In-the-Wild"
Recently, technologies such as face detection, facial landmark localisation
and face recognition and verification have matured enough to provide effective
and efficient solutions for imagery captured under arbitrary conditions
(referred to as "in-the-wild"). This is partially attributed to the fact that
comprehensive "in-the-wild" benchmarks have been developed for face detection,
landmark localisation and recognition/verification. A very important technology
that has not been thoroughly evaluated yet is deformable face tracking
"in-the-wild". Until now, the performance has mainly been assessed
qualitatively by visually assessing the result of a deformable face tracking
technology on short videos. In this paper, we perform the first, to the best of
our knowledge, thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art deformable face tracking
pipelines using the recently introduced 300VW benchmark. We evaluate many
different architectures focusing mainly on the task of on-line deformable face
tracking. In particular, we compare the following general strategies: (a)
generic face detection plus generic facial landmark localisation, (b) generic
model free tracking plus generic facial landmark localisation, as well as (c)
hybrid approaches using state-of-the-art face detection, model free tracking
and facial landmark localisation technologies. Our evaluation reveals future
avenues for further research on the topic.Comment: E. Antonakos and P. Snape contributed equally and have joint second
authorshi
A survey on mouth modeling and analysis for Sign Language recognition
© 2015 IEEE.Around 70 million Deaf worldwide use Sign Languages (SLs) as their native languages. At the same time, they have limited reading/writing skills in the spoken language. This puts them at a severe disadvantage in many contexts, including education, work, usage of computers and the Internet. Automatic Sign Language Recognition (ASLR) can support the Deaf in many ways, e.g. by enabling the development of systems for Human-Computer Interaction in SL and translation between sign and spoken language. Research in ASLR usually revolves around automatic understanding of manual signs. Recently, ASLR research community has started to appreciate the importance of non-manuals, since they are related to the lexical meaning of a sign, the syntax and the prosody. Nonmanuals include body and head pose, movement of the eyebrows and the eyes, as well as blinks and squints. Arguably, the mouth is one of the most involved parts of the face in non-manuals. Mouth actions related to ASLR can be either mouthings, i.e. visual syllables with the mouth while signing, or non-verbal mouth gestures. Both are very important in ASLR. In this paper, we present the first survey on mouth non-manuals in ASLR. We start by showing why mouth motion is important in SL and the relevant techniques that exist within ASLR. Since limited research has been conducted regarding automatic analysis of mouth motion in the context of ALSR, we proceed by surveying relevant techniques from the areas of automatic mouth expression and visual speech recognition which can be applied to the task. Finally, we conclude by presenting the challenges and potentials of automatic analysis of mouth motion in the context of ASLR
Articulated Clinician Detection Using 3D Pictorial Structures on RGB-D Data
Reliable human pose estimation (HPE) is essential to many clinical
applications, such as surgical workflow analysis, radiation safety monitoring
and human-robot cooperation. Proposed methods for the operating room (OR) rely
either on foreground estimation using a multi-camera system, which is a
challenge in real ORs due to color similarities and frequent illumination
changes, or on wearable sensors or markers, which are invasive and therefore
difficult to introduce in the room. Instead, we propose a novel approach based
on Pictorial Structures (PS) and on RGB-D data, which can be easily deployed in
real ORs. We extend the PS framework in two ways. First, we build robust and
discriminative part detectors using both color and depth images. We also
present a novel descriptor for depth images, called histogram of depth
differences (HDD). Second, we extend PS to 3D by proposing 3D pairwise
constraints and a new method that makes exact inference tractable. Our approach
is evaluated for pose estimation and clinician detection on a challenging RGB-D
dataset recorded in a busy operating room during live surgeries. We conduct
series of experiments to study the different part detectors in conjunction with
the various 2D or 3D pairwise constraints. Our comparisons demonstrate that 3D
PS with RGB-D part detectors significantly improves the results in a visually
challenging operating environment.Comment: The supplementary video is available at https://youtu.be/iabbGSqRSg
State of research in automatic as-built modelling
This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aei.2015.01.001Building Information Models (BIMs) are becoming the official standard in the construction industry for encoding, reusing, and exchanging information about structural assets. Automatically generating such representations for existing assets stirs up the interest of various industrial, academic, and governmental parties, as it is expected to have a high economic impact. The purpose of this paper is to provide a general overview of the as-built modelling process, with focus on the geometric modelling side. Relevant works from the Computer Vision, Geometry Processing, and Civil Engineering communities are presented and compared in terms of their potential to lead to automatic as-built modelling.We acknowledge the support of EPSRC Grant NMZJ/114,DARPA UPSIDE Grant A13–0895-S002, NSF CAREER Grant N. 1054127, European Grant Agreements No. 247586 and 334241. We would also like to thank NSERC Canada, Aecon, and SNC-Lavalin for financially supporting some parts of this research
Single Image Depth Prediction Made Better: A Multivariate Gaussian Take
Neural-network-based single image depth prediction (SIDP) is a challenging
task where the goal is to predict the scene's per-pixel depth at test time.
Since the problem, by definition, is ill-posed, the fundamental goal is to come
up with an approach that can reliably model the scene depth from a set of
training examples. In the pursuit of perfect depth estimation, most existing
state-of-the-art learning techniques predict a single scalar depth value
per-pixel. Yet, it is well-known that the trained model has accuracy limits and
can predict imprecise depth. Therefore, an SIDP approach must be mindful of the
expected depth variations in the model's prediction at test time. Accordingly,
we introduce an approach that performs continuous modeling of per-pixel depth,
where we can predict and reason about the per-pixel depth and its distribution.
To this end, we model per-pixel scene depth using a multivariate Gaussian
distribution. Moreover, contrary to the existing uncertainty modeling methods
-- in the same spirit, where per-pixel depth is assumed to be independent, we
introduce per-pixel covariance modeling that encodes its depth dependency w.r.t
all the scene points. Unfortunately, per-pixel depth covariance modeling leads
to a computationally expensive continuous loss function, which we solve
efficiently using the learned low-rank approximation of the overall covariance
matrix. Notably, when tested on benchmark datasets such as KITTI, NYU, and
SUN-RGB-D, the SIDP model obtained by optimizing our loss function shows
state-of-the-art results. Our method's accuracy (named MG) is among the top on
the KITTI depth-prediction benchmark leaderboard.Comment: Accepted to IEEE/CVF CVPR 2023. Draft info: 17 pages, 13 Figures, 9
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