Real-Time Hand Tracking Using a Sum of Anisotropic Gaussians Model

Real-time marker-less hand tracking is of increasing importance in human-computer interaction. Robust and accurate tracking of arbitrary hand motion is a challenging problem due to the many degrees of freedom, frequent self-occlusions, fast motions, and uniform skin color. In this paper, we propose a new approach that tracks the full skeleton motion of the hand from multiple RGB cameras in real-time. The main contributions include a new generative tracking method which employs an implicit hand shape representation based on Sum of Anisotropic Gaussians (SAG), and a pose fitting energy that is smooth and analytically differentiable making fast gradient based pose optimization possible. This shape representation, together with a full perspective projection model, enables more accurate hand modeling than a related baseline method from literature. Our method achieves better accuracy than previous methods and runs at 25 fps. We show these improvements both qualitatively and quantitatively on publicly available datasets.Comment: 8 pages, Accepted version of paper published at 3DV 201

Human Pose Estimation from Monocular Images : a Comprehensive Survey

Human pose estimation refers to the estimation of the location of body parts and how they are connected in an image. Human pose estimation from monocular images has wide applications (e.g., image indexing). Several surveys on human pose estimation can be found in the literature, but they focus on a certain category; for example, model-based approaches or human motion analysis, etc. As far as we know, an overall review of this problem domain has yet to be provided. Furthermore, recent advancements based on deep learning have brought novel algorithms for this problem. In this paper, a comprehensive survey of human pose estimation from monocular images is carried out including milestone works and recent advancements. Based on one standard pipeline for the solution of computer vision problems, this survey splits the problema into several modules: feature extraction and description, human body models, and modelin methods. Problem modeling methods are approached based on two means of categorization in this survey. One way to categorize includes top-down and bottom-up methods, and another way includes generative and discriminative methods. Considering the fact that one direct application of human pose estimation is to provide initialization for automatic video surveillance, there are additional sections for motion-related methods in all modules: motion features, motion models, and motion-based methods. Finally, the paper also collects 26 publicly available data sets for validation and provides error measurement methods that are frequently used

V2V-PoseNet: Voxel-to-Voxel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Hand and Human Pose Estimation from a Single Depth Map

Most of the existing deep learning-based methods for 3D hand and human pose estimation from a single depth map are based on a common framework that takes a 2D depth map and directly regresses the 3D coordinates of keypoints, such as hand or human body joints, via 2D convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The first weakness of this approach is the presence of perspective distortion in the 2D depth map. While the depth map is intrinsically 3D data, many previous methods treat depth maps as 2D images that can distort the shape of the actual object through projection from 3D to 2D space. This compels the network to perform perspective distortion-invariant estimation. The second weakness of the conventional approach is that directly regressing 3D coordinates from a 2D image is a highly non-linear mapping, which causes difficulty in the learning procedure. To overcome these weaknesses, we firstly cast the 3D hand and human pose estimation problem from a single depth map into a voxel-to-voxel prediction that uses a 3D voxelized grid and estimates the per-voxel likelihood for each keypoint. We design our model as a 3D CNN that provides accurate estimates while running in real-time. Our system outperforms previous methods in almost all publicly available 3D hand and human pose estimation datasets and placed first in the HANDS 2017 frame-based 3D hand pose estimation challenge. The code is available in https://github.com/mks0601/V2V-PoseNet_RELEASE.Comment: HANDS 2017 Challenge Frame-based 3D Hand Pose Estimation Winner (ICCV 2017), Published at CVPR 201

MonoPerfCap: Human Performance Capture from Monocular Video

We present the first marker-less approach for temporally coherent 3D performance capture of a human with general clothing from monocular video. Our approach reconstructs articulated human skeleton motion as well as medium-scale non-rigid surface deformations in general scenes. Human performance capture is a challenging problem due to the large range of articulation, potentially fast motion, and considerable non-rigid deformations, even from multi-view data. Reconstruction from monocular video alone is drastically more challenging, since strong occlusions and the inherent depth ambiguity lead to a highly ill-posed reconstruction problem. We tackle these challenges by a novel approach that employs sparse 2D and 3D human pose detections from a convolutional neural network using a batch-based pose estimation strategy. Joint recovery of per-batch motion allows to resolve the ambiguities of the monocular reconstruction problem based on a low dimensional trajectory subspace. In addition, we propose refinement of the surface geometry based on fully automatically extracted silhouettes to enable medium-scale non-rigid alignment. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance capture results that enable exciting applications such as video editing and free viewpoint video, previously infeasible from monocular video. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluation demonstrates that our approach significantly outperforms previous monocular methods in terms of accuracy, robustness and scene complexity that can be handled.Comment: Accepted to ACM TOG 2018, to be presented on SIGGRAPH 201

Bags of Affine Subspaces for Robust Object Tracking

We propose an adaptive tracking algorithm where the object is modelled as a continuously updated bag of affine subspaces, with each subspace constructed from the object's appearance over several consecutive frames. In contrast to linear subspaces, affine subspaces explicitly model the origin of subspaces. Furthermore, instead of using a brittle point-to-subspace distance during the search for the object in a new frame, we propose to use a subspace-to-subspace distance by representing candidate image areas also as affine subspaces. Distances between subspaces are then obtained by exploiting the non-Euclidean geometry of Grassmann manifolds. Experiments on challenging videos (containing object occlusions, deformations, as well as variations in pose and illumination) indicate that the proposed method achieves higher tracking accuracy than several recent discriminative trackers.Comment: in International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications, 201

Hybrid One-Shot 3D Hand Pose Estimation by Exploiting Uncertainties

Model-based approaches to 3D hand tracking have been shown to perform well in a wide range of scenarios. However, they require initialisation and cannot recover easily from tracking failures that occur due to fast hand motions. Data-driven approaches, on the other hand, can quickly deliver a solution, but the results often suffer from lower accuracy or missing anatomical validity compared to those obtained from model-based approaches. In this work we propose a hybrid approach for hand pose estimation from a single depth image. First, a learned regressor is employed to deliver multiple initial hypotheses for the 3D position of each hand joint. Subsequently, the kinematic parameters of a 3D hand model are found by deliberately exploiting the inherent uncertainty of the inferred joint proposals. This way, the method provides anatomically valid and accurate solutions without requiring manual initialisation or suffering from track losses. Quantitative results on several standard datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art representatives of the model-based, data-driven and hybrid paradigms.Comment: BMVC 2015 (oral); see also http://lrs.icg.tugraz.at/research/hybridhape