Calipso: Physics-based Image and Video Editing through CAD Model Proxies

We present Calipso, an interactive method for editing images and videos in a physically-coherent manner. Our main idea is to realize physics-based manipulations by running a full physics simulation on proxy geometries given by non-rigidly aligned CAD models. Running these simulations allows us to apply new, unseen forces to move or deform selected objects, change physical parameters such as mass or elasticity, or even add entire new objects that interact with the rest of the underlying scene. In Calipso, the user makes edits directly in 3D; these edits are processed by the simulation and then transfered to the target 2D content using shape-to-image correspondences in a photo-realistic rendering process. To align the CAD models, we introduce an efficient CAD-to-image alignment procedure that jointly minimizes for rigid and non-rigid alignment while preserving the high-level structure of the input shape. Moreover, the user can choose to exploit image flow to estimate scene motion, producing coherent physical behavior with ambient dynamics. We demonstrate Calipso's physics-based editing on a wide range of examples producing myriad physical behavior while preserving geometric and visual consistency.Comment: 11 page

DAP3D-Net: Where, What and How Actions Occur in Videos?

Action parsing in videos with complex scenes is an interesting but challenging task in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a generic 3D convolutional neural network in a multi-task learning manner for effective Deep Action Parsing (DAP3D-Net) in videos. Particularly, in the training phase, action localization, classification and attributes learning can be jointly optimized on our appearancemotion data via DAP3D-Net. For an upcoming test video, we can describe each individual action in the video simultaneously as: Where the action occurs, What the action is and How the action is performed. To well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DAP3D-Net, we also contribute a new Numerous-category Aligned Synthetic Action dataset, i.e., NASA, which consists of 200; 000 action clips of more than 300 categories and with 33 pre-defined action attributes in two hierarchical levels (i.e., low-level attributes of basic body part movements and high-level attributes related to action motion). We learn DAP3D-Net using the NASA dataset and then evaluate it on our collected Human Action Understanding (HAU) dataset. Experimental results show that our approach can accurately localize, categorize and describe multiple actions in realistic videos

Towards a Smart Drone Cinematographer for Filming Human Motion

Affordable consumer drones have made capturing aerial footage more convenient and accessible. However, shooting cinematic motion videos using a drone is challenging because it requires users to analyze dynamic scenarios while operating the controller. In this thesis, our task is to develop an autonomous drone cinematography system to capture cinematic videos of human motion. We understand the system's filming performance to be influenced by three key components: 1) video quality metric, which measures the aesthetic quality -- the angle, the distance, the image composition -- of the captured video, 2) visual feature, which encapsulates the visual elements that influence the filming style, and 3) camera planning, which is a decision-making model that predicts the next best movement. By analyzing these three components, we designed two autonomous drone cinematography systems using both heuristic-based methods and learning-based methods.For the first system, we designed an Autonomous CinemaTography system -- "ACT" by proposing a viewpoint quality metric focusing on the visibility of the 3D human skeleton of the subject. We expanded the application of human motion analysis and simplified manual control by assisting viewpoint selection using a through-the-lens method. For the second system, we designed an imitation-based system that learns the artistic intention of the cameramen through watching professional aerial videos. We designed a camera planner that analyzes the video contents and previous camera motion to predict future camera motion. Furthermore, we propose a planning framework, which can imitate a filming style by ``seeing" only one single demonstration video of such style. We named it ``one-shot imitation filming." To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that extends imitation learning to autonomous filming. Experimental results in both simulation and field test exhibit significant improvements over existing techniques and our approach managed to help inexperienced pilots capture cinematic videos

The Visual Centrifuge: Model-Free Layered Video Representations

True video understanding requires making sense of non-lambertian scenes where the color of light arriving at the camera sensor encodes information about not just the last object it collided with, but about multiple mediums -- colored windows, dirty mirrors, smoke or rain. Layered video representations have the potential of accurately modelling realistic scenes but have so far required stringent assumptions on motion, lighting and shape. Here we propose a learning-based approach for multi-layered video representation: we introduce novel uncertainty-capturing 3D convolutional architectures and train them to separate blended videos. We show that these models then generalize to single videos, where they exhibit interesting abilities: color constancy, factoring out shadows and separating reflections. We present quantitative and qualitative results on real world videos.Comment: Appears in: 2019 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2019). This arXiv contains the CVPR Camera Ready version of the paper (although we have included larger figures) as well as an appendix detailing the model architectur