40,653 research outputs found
Smaller = denser, and the brain knows it: natural statistics of object density shape weight expectations.
If one nondescript object's volume is twice that of another, is it necessarily twice as heavy? As larger objects are typically heavier than smaller ones, one might assume humans use such heuristics in preparing to lift novel objects if other informative cues (e.g., material, previous lifts) are unavailable. However, it is also known that humans are sensitive to statistical properties of our environments, and that such sensitivity can bias perception. Here we asked whether statistical regularities in properties of liftable, everyday objects would bias human observers' predictions about objects' weight relationships. We developed state-of-the-art computer vision techniques to precisely measure the volume of everyday objects, and also measured their weight. We discovered that for liftable man-made objects, "twice as large" doesn't mean "twice as heavy": Smaller objects are typically denser, following a power function of volume. Interestingly, this "smaller is denser" relationship does not hold for natural or unliftable objects, suggesting some ideal density range for objects designed to be lifted. We then asked human observers to predict weight relationships between novel objects without lifting them; crucially, these weight predictions quantitatively match typical weight relationships shown by similarly-sized objects in everyday environments. These results indicate that the human brain represents the statistics of everyday objects and that this representation can be quantitatively abstracted and applied to novel objects. Finally, that the brain possesses and can use precise knowledge of the nonlinear association between size and weight carries important implications for implementation of forward models of motor control in artificial systems
Cascaded 3D Full-body Pose Regression from Single Depth Image at 100 FPS
There are increasing real-time live applications in virtual reality, where it
plays an important role in capturing and retargetting 3D human pose. But it is
still challenging to estimate accurate 3D pose from consumer imaging devices
such as depth camera. This paper presents a novel cascaded 3D full-body pose
regression method to estimate accurate pose from a single depth image at 100
fps. The key idea is to train cascaded regressors based on Gradient Boosting
algorithm from pre-recorded human motion capture database. By incorporating
hierarchical kinematics model of human pose into the learning procedure, we can
directly estimate accurate 3D joint angles instead of joint positions. The
biggest advantage of this model is that the bone length can be preserved during
the whole 3D pose estimation procedure, which leads to more effective features
and higher pose estimation accuracy. Our method can be used as an
initialization procedure when combining with tracking methods. We demonstrate
the power of our method on a wide range of synthesized human motion data from
CMU mocap database, Human3.6M dataset and real human movements data captured in
real time. In our comparison against previous 3D pose estimation methods and
commercial system such as Kinect 2017, we achieve the state-of-the-art
accuracy
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