LiveCap: Real-time Human Performance Capture from Monocular Video

We present the first real-time human performance capture approach that reconstructs dense, space-time coherent deforming geometry of entire humans in general everyday clothing from just a single RGB video. We propose a novel two-stage analysis-by-synthesis optimization whose formulation and implementation are designed for high performance. In the first stage, a skinned template model is jointly fitted to background subtracted input video, 2D and 3D skeleton joint positions found using a deep neural network, and a set of sparse facial landmark detections. In the second stage, dense non-rigid 3D deformations of skin and even loose apparel are captured based on a novel real-time capable algorithm for non-rigid tracking using dense photometric and silhouette constraints. Our novel energy formulation leverages automatically identified material regions on the template to model the differing non-rigid deformation behavior of skin and apparel. The two resulting non-linear optimization problems per-frame are solved with specially-tailored data-parallel Gauss-Newton solvers. In order to achieve real-time performance of over 25Hz, we design a pipelined parallel architecture using the CPU and two commodity GPUs. Our method is the first real-time monocular approach for full-body performance capture. Our method yields comparable accuracy with off-line performance capture techniques, while being orders of magnitude faster

Towards the high-fidelity multidisciplinary design optimization of a 3d composite material hydrofoil

The development of a multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) architecture for high-fidelity fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems is presented with preliminary application to a NACA 0009 3D hydrofoil in metal and carbon-fiber reinforced plastic materials. The MDO methodology and FSI benchmark solution are presented and discussed. The computational cost of the MDO is reduced by performing a design space dimensionality reduction beforehand and integrating into the architecture a variable level of coupling between disciplines, a surrogate model, and an adaptive sampling technique. The optimization is performed using a heuristic global derivative-free algorithm. The MDO method is demonstrated by application to an analytical test problem. Current stage of research includes preliminary test problem optimization, validation of the hydrofoil FSI against experimental data, and design space assessment and dimensionality reduction for the hydrofoil model

Exploring the fitness landscape of a realistic turbofan rotor blade optimization

Aerodynamic shape optimization has established itself as a valuable tool in the engineering design process to achieve highly efficient results. A central aspect for such approaches is the mapping from the design parameters which encode the geometry of the shape to be improved to the quality criteria which describe its performance. The choices to be made in the setup of the optimization process strongly influence this mapping and thus are expected to have a profound influence on the achievable result. In this work we explore the influence of such choices on the effects on the shape optimization of a turbofan rotor blade as it can be realized within an aircraft engine design process. The blade quality is assessed by realistic three dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. We investigate the outcomes of several optimization runs which differ in various configuration options, such as optimization algorithm, initialization, number of degrees of freedom for the parametrization. For all such variations, we generally find that the achievable improvement of the blade quality is comparable for most settings and thus rather insensitive to the details of the setup. On the other hand, even supposedly minor changes in the settings, such as using a different random seed for the initialization of the optimizer algorithm, lead to very different shapes. Optimized shapes which show comparable performance usually differ quite strongly in their geometries over the complete blade. Our analyses indicate that the fitness landscape for such a realistic turbofan rotor blade optimization is highly multi-modal with many local optima, where very different shapes show similar performance

Evolvability-guided Optimization of Linear Deformation Setups for Evolutionary Design Optimization

Richter A. Evolvability-guided Optimization of Linear Deformation Setups for Evolutionary Design Optimization. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2019.Andreas Richter gratefully acknowledges the financial support from Honda Research Institute Europe (HRI-EU).This thesis targets efficient solutions for optimal representation setups for evolutionary design optimization problems. The representation maps the abstract parameters of an optimizer to a meaningful variation of the design model, e.g., the shape of a car. Thereby, it determines the convergence speed to and the quality of the final result. Thus, engineers are eager to employ well-tuned representations to achieve high-quality design solutions. But, setting up optimal representations is a cumbersome process because the setup procedure requires detailed knowledge about the objective functions, e.g., a fluid dynamics simulation, and the parameters of the employed representation itself. Thus, we target efficient routines to set up representations automatically to support engineers from their tedious, partly manual work. Inspired by the concept of evolvability, we present novel quality criteria for the evaluation of linear deformations commonly applied as representations. We define and analyze the criteria variability, regularity, and improvement potential which measure the expected quality and convergence speed of an evolutionary design optimization process based on the linear deformation setup. Moreover, we target the efficient optimization of deformation setups with respect to these three criteria. In dynamic design optimization scenarios a suitable compromise between exploration and exploitation is crucial for efficient solutions. We discuss the construction of optimal compromises for these dynamic scenarios with our criteria because they characterize exploration and exploitation. As a result an engineer can initialize and adjust the deformation setup for improved convergence speed of a design process and for enhanced quality of the design solutions with our methods

Evolvability-guided Optimization of Linear Deformation Setups for Evolutionary Design Optimization

Richter A. Evolvability-guided Optimization of Linear Deformation Setups for Evolutionary Design Optimization. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2019.Andreas Richter gratefully acknowledges the financial support from Honda Research Institute Europe (HRI-EU).This thesis targets efficient solutions for optimal representation setups for evolutionary design optimization problems. The representation maps the abstract parameters of an optimizer to a meaningful variation of the design model, e.g., the shape of a car. Thereby, it determines the convergence speed to and the quality of the final result. Thus, engineers are eager to employ well-tuned representations to achieve high-quality design solutions. But, setting up optimal representations is a cumbersome process because the setup procedure requires detailed knowledge about the objective functions, e.g., a fluid dynamics simulation, and the parameters of the employed representation itself. Thus, we target efficient routines to set up representations automatically to support engineers from their tedious, partly manual work. Inspired by the concept of evolvability, we present novel quality criteria for the evaluation of linear deformations commonly applied as representations. We define and analyze the criteria variability, regularity, and improvement potential which measure the expected quality and convergence speed of an evolutionary design optimization process based on the linear deformation setup. Moreover, we target the efficient optimization of deformation setups with respect to these three criteria. In dynamic design optimization scenarios a suitable compromise between exploration and exploitation is crucial for efficient solutions. We discuss the construction of optimal compromises for these dynamic scenarios with our criteria because they characterize exploration and exploitation. As a result an engineer can initialize and adjust the deformation setup for improved convergence speed of a design process and for enhanced quality of the design solutions with our methods

Shape Animation with Combined Captured and Simulated Dynamics

We present a novel volumetric animation generation framework to create new types of animations from raw 3D surface or point cloud sequence of captured real performances. The framework considers as input time incoherent 3D observations of a moving shape, and is thus particularly suitable for the output of performance capture platforms. In our system, a suitable virtual representation of the actor is built from real captures that allows seamless combination and simulation with virtual external forces and objects, in which the original captured actor can be reshaped, disassembled or reassembled from user-specified virtual physics. Instead of using the dominant surface-based geometric representation of the capture, which is less suitable for volumetric effects, our pipeline exploits Centroidal Voronoi tessellation decompositions as unified volumetric representation of the real captured actor, which we show can be used seamlessly as a building block for all processing stages, from capture and tracking to virtual physic simulation. The representation makes no human specific assumption and can be used to capture and re-simulate the actor with props or other moving scenery elements. We demonstrate the potential of this pipeline for virtual reanimation of a real captured event with various unprecedented volumetric visual effects, such as volumetric distortion, erosion, morphing, gravity pull, or collisions

Fast Non-Rigid Radiance Fields from Monocularized Data

3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis of dynamic scenes from collectionsof single views recently gained increased attention. Existing work showsimpressive results for synthetic setups and forward-facing real-world data, butis severely limited in the training speed and angular range for generatingnovel views. This paper addresses these limitations and proposes a new methodfor full 360{\deg} novel view synthesis of non-rigidly deforming scenes. At thecore of our method are: 1) An efficient deformation module that decouples theprocessing of spatial and temporal information for acceleration at training andinference time; and 2) A static module representing the canonical scene as afast hash-encoded neural radiance field. We evaluate the proposed approach onthe established synthetic D-NeRF benchmark, that enables efficientreconstruction from a single monocular view per time-frame randomly sampledfrom a full hemisphere. We refer to this form of inputs as monocularized data.To prove its practicality for real-world scenarios, we recorded twelvechallenging sequences with human actors by sampling single frames from asynchronized multi-view rig. In both cases, our method is trained significantlyfaster than previous methods (minutes instead of days) while achieving highervisual accuracy for generated novel views. Our source code and data isavailable at our project pagehttps://graphics.tu-bs.de/publications/kappel2022fast.<br

Fast Non-Rigid Radiance Fields from Monocularized Data

The reconstruction and novel view synthesis of dynamic scenes recently gained increased attention. As reconstruction from large-scale multi-view data involves immense memory and computational requirements, recent benchmark datasets provide collections of single monocular views per timestamp sampled from multiple (virtual) cameras. We refer to this form of inputs as "monocularized" data. Existing work shows impressive results for synthetic setups and forward-facing real-world data, but is often limited in the training speed and angular range for generating novel views. This paper addresses these limitations and proposes a new method for full 360{\deg} inward-facing novel view synthesis of non-rigidly deforming scenes. At the core of our method are: 1) An efficient deformation module that decouples the processing of spatial and temporal information for accelerated training and inference; and 2) A static module representing the canonical scene as a fast hash-encoded neural radiance field. In addition to existing synthetic monocularized data, we systematically analyze the performance on real-world inward-facing scenes using a newly recorded challenging dataset sampled from a synchronized large-scale multi-view rig. In both cases, our method is significantly faster than previous methods, converging in less than 7 minutes and achieving real-time framerates at 1K resolution, while obtaining a higher visual accuracy for generated novel views. Our source code and data is available at our project page https://graphics.tu-bs.de/publications/kappel2022fast.Comment: 18 pages, 14 figures; project page: https://graphics.tu-bs.de/publications/kappel2022fas