18,823 research outputs found
Learning to Dress {3D} People in Generative Clothing
Three-dimensional human body models are widely used in the analysis of human
pose and motion. Existing models, however, are learned from minimally-clothed
3D scans and thus do not generalize to the complexity of dressed people in
common images and videos. Additionally, current models lack the expressive
power needed to represent the complex non-linear geometry of pose-dependent
clothing shapes. To address this, we learn a generative 3D mesh model of
clothed people from 3D scans with varying pose and clothing. Specifically, we
train a conditional Mesh-VAE-GAN to learn the clothing deformation from the
SMPL body model, making clothing an additional term in SMPL. Our model is
conditioned on both pose and clothing type, giving the ability to draw samples
of clothing to dress different body shapes in a variety of styles and poses. To
preserve wrinkle detail, our Mesh-VAE-GAN extends patchwise discriminators to
3D meshes. Our model, named CAPE, represents global shape and fine local
structure, effectively extending the SMPL body model to clothing. To our
knowledge, this is the first generative model that directly dresses 3D human
body meshes and generalizes to different poses. The model, code and data are
available for research purposes at https://cape.is.tue.mpg.de.Comment: CVPR-2020 camera ready. Code and data are available at
https://cape.is.tue.mpg.d
Civil Procedure and the Ministerial Exception
In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized a ministerial exception to the ordinary rules of employer liability. The Court also concluded that the exception operates as an affirmative defense rather than a jurisdictional bar. This conclusion raises quite significant questions about how courts should address the exception in the course of litigation. This Article posits that courts should approach these procedural questions in light of the underlying justification for the ministerial exception. The exception reflects a longstanding constitutional limitation on the competence of courts to resolve âstrictly and purely ecclesiasticalâ questions. To conclude that the exception operates as an affirmative defense does not alter this fundamental limitation on the authority of secular courts. As a practical matter, this means that in litigation between religious institutions and their employees, courts may be required to manage discovery to resolve threshold questions about the application of the ministerial exception before permitting broader discovery. Similarly, courts should consider permitting interlocutory appeals of trial court decisions that deny motions for summary judgment based on the exception. And courts not only should conclude that religious institutions do not waive the defense by failing to raise it but also ought to raise it sua sponte when the facts indicate that the exception may apply. These departures from the ordinary treatment of affirmative defenses are necessary to respect the constitutional principles that the Court articulated in Hosanna-Tabor
Political and ethnic representation in Chinese local governance : analysis of the roles of the deputies of Leishan County People's Congress, Guizhou Province, China : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Development Studies, Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
This thesis investigates the political and ethnic environment of local Chinese political actors
and their representational dilemmas in the Miao-dominant area of Leishan County, Guizhou
Province, China. The investigation is conducted via two research questions: how do the
deputies of a Miao County Peopleâs Congress in China play their roles in representing the
interests of the state towards the community, and how do they represent the interests of the
community towards the state? The achievements of the deputies and the challenges they face
in their dual representational roles are a focus of the analysis. The thesis provides insight into
the governance and politics of a local government body dominated by an ethnic minority and
the interplay of these dynamics with central government authorities presided over by Han
Chinese.
The representative structure of the Leishan County Peopleâs Congress (LCPC) and its deputy
membership is explored to understand how the deputies enact their roles in promoting,
intervening in and restructuring development projects as both agents of and remonstrators to
the central state. Case studies of village governance and cultural tourism are used to illustrate
how the LCPC deputies are both coordinators and negotiators in a polycentric local
governance structure.
The fieldwork was carried out in the ethnic area of Leishan County. Relevant data was
collected through four interrelated research methods: focus groups, semi-structured individual
interviews, purposive observation and document analysis. The quantification of pairwise
ranking by the focus groups highlighted the achievements and challenges in the key functions
required of the deputies. The data also led to two further areas for in-depth analysis: centrallocal
relations, and the political and ethnic representation of the deputies.
The research found that when conflicts exist, political representation that favours the state
prevails over community interests. At the same time, the deputiesâ representation of their
ethnic communities is enhanced and augmented when they undertake to localise the national
development policies and projects handed down by central authorities. Finally, the concept of
polycentric governance enables a more precise understanding of the changing local
governance systems in China among the diverse stakeholders present in the ethnic
communities
VNect: Real-time 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Single RGB Camera
We present the first real-time method to capture the full global 3D skeletal
pose of a human in a stable, temporally consistent manner using a single RGB
camera. Our method combines a new convolutional neural network (CNN) based pose
regressor with kinematic skeleton fitting. Our novel fully-convolutional pose
formulation regresses 2D and 3D joint positions jointly in real time and does
not require tightly cropped input frames. A real-time kinematic skeleton
fitting method uses the CNN output to yield temporally stable 3D global pose
reconstructions on the basis of a coherent kinematic skeleton. This makes our
approach the first monocular RGB method usable in real-time applications such
as 3D character control---thus far, the only monocular methods for such
applications employed specialized RGB-D cameras. Our method's accuracy is
quantitatively on par with the best offline 3D monocular RGB pose estimation
methods. Our results are qualitatively comparable to, and sometimes better
than, results from monocular RGB-D approaches, such as the Kinect. However, we
show that our approach is more broadly applicable than RGB-D solutions, i.e. it
works for outdoor scenes, community videos, and low quality commodity RGB
cameras.Comment: Accepted to SIGGRAPH 201
The role of human body movements in mate selection
It is common scientific knowledge, that most of what we say within a conversation is not only expressed by the words meaning alone, but also through our gestures, postures, and body movements. This non-verbal mode is possibly rooted firmly in our human evolutionary heritage, and as such, some scientists argue that it serves as a fundamental assessment and expression tool for our inner qualities. Studies of nonverbal communication have established that a universal, culture-free, non-verbal sign system exists, that is available to all individuals for negotiating social encounters. Thus, it is not only the kind of gestures and expressions humans use in social communication, but also the way these movements are performed, as this seems to convey key information about an individuals quality. Dance, for example, is a special form of movement, which can be observed in human courtship displays. Recent research suggests that people are sensitive to the variation in dance movements, and that dance performance provides information about an individuals mate quality in terms of health and strength. This article reviews the role of body movement in human non-verbal communication, and highlights its significance in human mate preferences in order to promote future work in this research area within the evolutionary psychology framework
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