75 research outputs found

    AI-generated Content for Various Data Modalities: A Survey

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    AI-generated content (AIGC) methods aim to produce text, images, videos, 3D assets, and other media using AI algorithms. Due to its wide range of applications and the demonstrated potential of recent works, AIGC developments have been attracting lots of attention recently, and AIGC methods have been developed for various data modalities, such as image, video, text, 3D shape (as voxels, point clouds, meshes, and neural implicit fields), 3D scene, 3D human avatar (body and head), 3D motion, and audio -- each presenting different characteristics and challenges. Furthermore, there have also been many significant developments in cross-modality AIGC methods, where generative methods can receive conditioning input in one modality and produce outputs in another. Examples include going from various modalities to image, video, 3D shape, 3D scene, 3D avatar (body and head), 3D motion (skeleton and avatar), and audio modalities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of AIGC methods across different data modalities, including both single-modality and cross-modality methods, highlighting the various challenges, representative works, and recent technical directions in each setting. We also survey the representative datasets throughout the modalities, and present comparative results for various modalities. Moreover, we also discuss the challenges and potential future research directions

    Artificial Intelligence in the Creative Industries: A Review

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    This paper reviews the current state of the art in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and applications in the context of the creative industries. A brief background of AI, and specifically Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, is provided including Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). We categorise creative applications into five groups related to how AI technologies are used: i) content creation, ii) information analysis, iii) content enhancement and post production workflows, iv) information extraction and enhancement, and v) data compression. We critically examine the successes and limitations of this rapidly advancing technology in each of these areas. We further differentiate between the use of AI as a creative tool and its potential as a creator in its own right. We foresee that, in the near future, machine learning-based AI will be adopted widely as a tool or collaborative assistant for creativity. In contrast, we observe that the successes of machine learning in domains with fewer constraints, where AI is the `creator', remain modest. The potential of AI (or its developers) to win awards for its original creations in competition with human creatives is also limited, based on contemporary technologies. We therefore conclude that, in the context of creative industries, maximum benefit from AI will be derived where its focus is human centric -- where it is designed to augment, rather than replace, human creativity

    Machine Learning in Robotic Navigation:Deep Visual Localization and Adaptive Control

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    The work conducted in this thesis contributes to the robotic navigation field by focusing on different machine learning solutions: supervised learning with (deep) neural networks, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning.First, we propose a semi-supervised machine learning approach that can dynamically update the robot controller's parameters using situational analysis through feature extraction and unsupervised clustering. The results show that the robot can adapt to the changes in its surroundings, resulting in a thirty percent improvement in navigation speed and stability.Then, we train multiple deep neural networks for estimating the robot's position in the environment using ground truth information provided by a classical localization and mapping approach. We prepare two image-based localization datasets in 3D simulation and compare the results of a traditional multilayer perceptron, a stacked denoising autoencoder, and a convolutional neural network (CNN). The experiment results show that our proposed inception based CNNs without pooling layers perform very well in all the environments. Finally, we propose a two-stage learning framework for visual navigation in which the experience of the agent during exploration of one goal is shared to learn to navigate to other goals. The multi-goal Q-function learns to traverse the environment by using the provided discretized map. Transfer learning is applied to the multi-goal Q-function from a maze structure to a 2D simulator and is finally deployed in a 3D simulator where the robot uses the estimated locations from the position estimator deep CNNs. The results show a significant improvement when multi-goal reinforcement learning is used

    Deep Learning Based Point Cloud Processing and Compression

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    Title from PDF of title page, viewed August 24, 2022Dissertation advisors: Zhu Li and Sejun SongVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 116-137)Dissertation (Ph.D)--Department of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2022A point cloud is a 3D data representation that is becoming increasingly popular. Recent significant advances in 3D sensors and capturing techniques have led to a surge in the usage of 3D point clouds in virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) content creation, as well as 3D sensing for robotics, smart cities, telepresence, and automated driving applications. With an increase in point cloud applications and improved capturing technologies, we now have high-resolution point clouds with millions of points per frame. However, due to the large size of a point cloud, efficient techniques for the transmission, compression, and processing of point cloud content are still widely sought. This thesis addresses multiple issues in the transmission, compression, and processing pipeline for point cloud data. We employ a deep learning solution to process 3D dense as well as sparse point cloud data for both static as well as dynamic contents. Employing deep learning on point cloud data which is inherently sparse is a challenging task. We propose multiple deep learning-based frameworks that address each of the following problems: Point Cloud Compression Artifact Removal. V-PCC is the current state-of-the-art for dynamic point cloud compression. However, at lower bitrates, there are unpleasant artifacts introduced by V-PCC. We propose a deep learning solution for V-PCC artifact removal by leveraging the direction of projection property in V-PCC to remove quantization noise. Point Cloud Geometry Prediction. The current point cloud lossy compression and processing techniques suffer from quantization loss which results in a coarser sub-sampled representation of the point cloud. We solve the problem of points lost during voxelization by performing geometry prediction across spatial scales using deep learning architecture. Point Cloud Geometry Upsampling. Loss of details and irregularities in point cloud geometry can occur during the capturing, processing, and compression pipeline. We present a novel geometry upsampling technique, PU-Dense, which can process a diverse set of point clouds including synthetic mesh-based point clouds, real-world high-resolution point clouds, real-world indoor LiDAR scanned objects, as well as outdoor dynamically acquired LiDAR-based point clouds. Dynamic Point Cloud Interpolation. Dense photorealistic point clouds can depict real-world dynamic objects in high resolution and with a high frame rate. Frame interpolation of such dynamic point clouds would enable the distribution, processing, and compression of such content. We also propose the first point cloud interpolation framework for photorealistic dynamic point clouds. Inter-frame Compression for Dynamic Point Clouds. Efficient point cloud compression is essential for applications like virtual and mixed reality, autonomous driving, and cultural heritage. We propose a deep learning-based inter-frame encoding scheme for dynamic point cloud geometry compression. In each case, our method achieves state-of-the-art results with significant improvement to the current technologies.Introduction -- Point cloud compression artifact removal -- Point cloud geometry prediction -- PU-Dense: sparse tensor-based point cloud geometry upsampling -- Dynamic point cloud interpolation -- Inter-frame compression for dynamic point cloud geometry codin

    Human Motion Generation: A Survey

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    Human motion generation aims to generate natural human pose sequences and shows immense potential for real-world applications. Substantial progress has been made recently in motion data collection technologies and generation methods, laying the foundation for increasing interest in human motion generation. Most research within this field focuses on generating human motions based on conditional signals, such as text, audio, and scene contexts. While significant advancements have been made in recent years, the task continues to pose challenges due to the intricate nature of human motion and its implicit relationship with conditional signals. In this survey, we present a comprehensive literature review of human motion generation, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first of its kind in this field. We begin by introducing the background of human motion and generative models, followed by an examination of representative methods for three mainstream sub-tasks: text-conditioned, audio-conditioned, and scene-conditioned human motion generation. Additionally, we provide an overview of common datasets and evaluation metrics. Lastly, we discuss open problems and outline potential future research directions. We hope that this survey could provide the community with a comprehensive glimpse of this rapidly evolving field and inspire novel ideas that address the outstanding challenges.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

    Advances in Data-Driven Analysis and Synthesis of 3D Indoor Scenes

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    This report surveys advances in deep learning-based modeling techniques that address four different 3D indoor scene analysis tasks, as well as synthesis of 3D indoor scenes. We describe different kinds of representations for indoor scenes, various indoor scene datasets available for research in the aforementioned areas, and discuss notable works employing machine learning models for such scene modeling tasks based on these representations. Specifically, we focus on the analysis and synthesis of 3D indoor scenes. With respect to analysis, we focus on four basic scene understanding tasks -- 3D object detection, 3D scene segmentation, 3D scene reconstruction and 3D scene similarity. And for synthesis, we mainly discuss neural scene synthesis works, though also highlighting model-driven methods that allow for human-centric, progressive scene synthesis. We identify the challenges involved in modeling scenes for these tasks and the kind of machinery that needs to be developed to adapt to the data representation, and the task setting in general. For each of these tasks, we provide a comprehensive summary of the state-of-the-art works across different axes such as the choice of data representation, backbone, evaluation metric, input, output, etc., providing an organized review of the literature. Towards the end, we discuss some interesting research directions that have the potential to make a direct impact on the way users interact and engage with these virtual scene models, making them an integral part of the metaverse.Comment: Published in Computer Graphics Forum, Aug 202

    Human-controllable and structured deep generative models

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    Deep generative models are a class of probabilistic models that attempts to learn the underlying data distribution. These models are usually trained in an unsupervised way and thus, do not require any labels. Generative models such as Variational Autoencoders and Generative Adversarial Networks have made astounding progress over the last years. These models have several benefits: eased sampling and evaluation, efficient learning of low-dimensional representations for downstream tasks, and better understanding through interpretable representations. However, even though the quality of these models has improved immensely, the ability to control their style and structure is limited. Structured and human-controllable representations of generative models are essential for human-machine interaction and other applications, including fairness, creativity, and entertainment. This thesis investigates learning human-controllable and structured representations with deep generative models. In particular, we focus on generative modelling of 2D images. For the first part, we focus on learning clustered representations. We propose semi-parametric hierarchical variational autoencoders to estimate the intensity of facial action units. The semi-parametric model forms a hybrid generative-discriminative model and leverages both parametric Variational Autoencoder and non-parametric Gaussian Process autoencoder. We show superior performance in comparison with existing facial action unit estimation approaches. Based on the results and analysis of the learned representation, we focus on learning Mixture-of-Gaussians representations in an autoencoding framework. We deviate from the conventional autoencoding framework and consider a regularized objective with the Cauchy-Schwarz divergence. The Cauchy-Schwarz divergence allows a closed-form solution for Mixture-of-Gaussian distributions and, thus, efficiently optimizing the autoencoding objective. We show that our model outperforms existing Variational Autoencoders in density estimation, clustering, and semi-supervised facial action detection. We focus on learning disentangled representations for conditional generation and fair facial attribute classification for the second part. Conditional image generation relies on the accessibility to large-scale annotated datasets. Nevertheless, the geometry of visual objects, such as in faces, cannot be learned implicitly and deteriorate image fidelity. We propose incorporating facial landmarks with a statistical shape model and a differentiable piecewise affine transformation to separate the representation for appearance and shape. The goal of incorporating facial landmarks is that generation is controlled and can separate different appearances and geometries. In our last work, we use weak supervision for disentangling groups of variations. Works on learning disentangled representation have been done in an unsupervised fashion. However, recent works have shown that learning disentangled representations is not identifiable without any inductive biases. Since then, there has been a shift towards weakly-supervised disentanglement learning. We investigate using regularization based on the Kullback-Leiber divergence to disentangle groups of variations. The goal is to have consistent and separated subspaces for different groups, e.g., for content-style learning. Our evaluation shows increased disentanglement abilities and competitive performance for image clustering and fair facial attribute classification with weak supervision compared to supervised and semi-supervised approaches.Open Acces

    Analysis of 2D and 3D images of the human head for shape, expression and gaze

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    Analysis of the full human head in the context of computer vision has been an ongoing research area for years. While the deep learning community has witnessed the trend of constructing end-to-end models that solve the problem in one pass, it is challenging to apply such a procedure to full human heads. This is because human heads are complicated and have numerous relatively small components with high-frequency details. For example, in a high-quality 3D scan of a full human head from the Headspace dataset, each ear part only occupies 1.5\% of the total vertices. A method that aims to reconstruct full 3D heads in an end-to-end manner is prone to ignoring the detail of ears. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the analysis of small components of the full human head individually but approaches each in an end-to-end training manner. The details of these three main contributions of the three individual parts are presented in three separate chapters. The first contribution aims at reconstructing the underlying 3D ear geometry and colour details given a monocular RGB image and uses the geometry information to initialise a model-fitting process that finds 55 3D ear landmarks on raw 3D head scans. The second contribution employs a similar pipeline but applies it to an eye-region and eyeball model. The work focuses on building a method that has the advantages of both the model-based approach and the appearance-based approach, resulting in an explicit model with state-of-the-art gaze prediction precision. The final work focuses on the separation of the facial identity and the facial expression via learning a disentangled representation. We design an autoencoder that extracts facial identity and facial expression representations separately. Finally, we overview our contributions and the prospects of the future applications that are enabled by them
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