Single View Reconstruction for Human Face and Motion with Priors

Single view reconstruction is fundamentally an under-constrained problem. We aim to develop new approaches to model human face and motion with model priors that restrict the space of possible solutions. First, we develop a novel approach to recover the 3D shape from a single view image under challenging conditions, such as large variations in illumination and pose. The problem is addressed by employing the techniques of non-linear manifold embedding and alignment. Specifically, the local image models for each patch of facial images and the local surface models for each patch of 3D shape are learned using a non-linear dimensionality reduction technique, and the correspondences between these local models are then learned by a manifold alignment method. Local models successfully remove the dependency of large training databases for human face modeling. By combining the local shapes, the global shape of a face can be reconstructed directly from a single linear system of equations via least square. Unfortunately, this learning-based approach cannot be successfully applied to the problem of human motion modeling due to the internal and external variations in single view video-based marker-less motion capture. Therefore, we introduce a new model-based approach for capturing human motion using a stream of depth images from a single depth sensor. While a depth sensor provides metric 3D information, using a single sensor, instead of a camera array, results in a view-dependent and incomplete measurement of object motion. We develop a novel two-stage template fitting algorithm that is invariant to subject size and view-point variations, and robust to occlusions. Starting from a known pose, our algorithm first estimates a body configuration through temporal registration, which is used to search the template motion database for a best match. The best match body configuration as well as its corresponding surface mesh model are deformed to fit the input depth map, filling in the part that is occluded from the input and compensating for differences in pose and body-size between the input image and the template. Our approach does not require any makers, user-interaction, or appearance-based tracking. Experiments show that our approaches can achieve good modeling results for human face and motion, and are capable of dealing with variety of challenges in single view reconstruction, e.g., occlusion

Structured 3D Features for Reconstructing Controllable Avatars

We introduce Structured 3D Features, a model based on a novel implicit 3D representation that pools pixel-aligned image features onto dense 3D points sampled from a parametric, statistical human mesh surface. The 3D points have associated semantics and can move freely in 3D space. This allows for optimal coverage of the person of interest, beyond just the body shape, which in turn, additionally helps modeling accessories, hair, and loose clothing. Owing to this, we present a complete 3D transformer-based attention framework which, given a single image of a person in an unconstrained pose, generates an animatable 3D reconstruction with albedo and illumination decomposition, as a result of a single end-to-end model, trained semi-supervised, and with no additional postprocessing. We show that our S3F model surpasses the previous state-of-the-art on various tasks, including monocular 3D reconstruction, as well as albedo and shading estimation. Moreover, we show that the proposed methodology allows novel view synthesis, relighting, and re-posing the reconstruction, and can naturally be extended to handle multiple input images (e.g. different views of a person, or the same view, in different poses, in video). Finally, we demonstrate the editing capabilities of our model for 3D virtual try-on applications.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 2023. Project page: https://enriccorona.github.io/s3f/, Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcZGcQ6L-2

Motion capture from single video sequence

Cataloged from PDF version of article.3D human pose reconstruction is a popular research area since it can be used in various applications. Currently most of the methods work for constrained environments, where multi camera views are available and camera calibration is known, or a single camera view is available, which requires intensive user effort. However most of the currently available data do not satisfy these constraints, thus they cannot be processed by these algorithms. In this thesis a framework is proposed to reconstruct 3D pose of a human for animation from a sequence of single view video frames. The framework for pose construction starts with background estimation. Once the image background is estimated, the body silhouette is extracted by using image subtraction for each frame. Then the body silhouettes are automatically labeled by using a model-based approach. Finally, the 3D pose is constructed from the labeled human silhouette by assuming orthographic projection. The proposed approach does not require camera calibration. The proposed framework assumes that the input video has a static background and it has no significant perspective effects and the performer is in upright position.Demir, İbrahimM.S

Vision-based 3D Pose Retrieval and Reconstruction

The people analysis and the understandings of their motions are the key components in many applications like sports sciences, biomechanics, medical rehabilitation, animated movie productions and the game industry. In this context, retrieval and reconstruction of the articulated 3D human poses are considered as the significant sub-elements. In this dissertation, we address the problem of retrieval and reconstruction of the 3D poses from a monocular video or even from a single RGB image. We propose a few data-driven pipelines to retrieve and reconstruct the 3D poses by exploiting the motion capture data as a prior. The main focus of our proposed approaches is to bridge the gap between the separate media of the 3D marker-based recording and the capturing of motions or photographs using a simple RGB camera. In principal, we leverage both media together efficiently for 3D pose estimation. We have shown that our proposed methodologies need not any synchronized 3D-2D pose-image pairs to retrieve and reconstruct the final 3D poses, and are flexible enough to capture motion in any studio-like indoor environment or outdoor natural environment. In first part of the dissertation, we propose model based approaches for full body human motion reconstruction from the video input by employing just 2D joint positions of the four end effectors and the head. We resolve the 3D-2D pose-image cross model correspondence by developing an intermediate container the knowledge base through the motion capture data which contains information about how people move. It includes the 3D normalized pose space and the corresponding synchronized 2D normalized pose space created by utilizing a number of virtual cameras. We first detect and track the features of these five joints from the input motion sequences using SURF, MSER and colorMSER feature detectors, which vote for the possible 2D locations for these joints in the video. The extraction of suitable feature sets from both, the input control signals and the motion capture data, enables us to retrieve the closest instances from the motion capture dataset through employing the fast searching and retrieval techniques. We develop a graphical structure online lazy neighbourhood graph in order to make the similarity search more accurate and robust by deploying the temporal coherence of the input control signals. The retrieved prior poses are exploited further in order to stabilize the feature detection and tracking process. Finally, the 3D motion sequences are reconstructed by a non-linear optimizer that takes into account multiple energy terms. We evaluate our approaches with a series of experiment scenarios designed in terms of performing actors, camera viewpoints and the noisy inputs. Only a little preprocessing is needed by our methods and the reconstruction processes run close to real time. The second part of the dissertation is dedicated to 3D human pose estimation from a monocular single image. First, we propose an efficient 3D pose retrieval strategy which leads towards a novel data driven approach to reconstruct a 3D human pose from a monocular still image. We design and devise multiple feature sets for global similarity search. At runtime, we search for the similar poses from a motion capture dataset in a definite feature space made up of specific joints. We introduce two-fold method for camera estimation, where we exploit the view directions at which we perform sampling of the MoCap dataset as well as the MoCap priors to minimize the projection error. We also benefit from the MoCap priors and the joints' weights in order to learn a low-dimensional local 3D pose model which is constrained further by multiple energies to infer the final 3D human pose. We thoroughly evaluate our approach on synthetically generated examples, the real internet images and the hand-drawn sketches. We achieve state-of-the-arts results when the test and MoCap data are from the same dataset and obtain competitive results when the motion capture data is taken from a different dataset. Second, we propose a dual source approach for 3D pose estimation from a single RGB image. One major challenge for 3D pose estimation from a single RGB image is the acquisition of sufficient training data. In particular, collecting large amounts of training data that contain unconstrained images and are annotated with accurate 3D poses is infeasible. We therefore propose to use two independent training sources. The first source consists of images with annotated 2D poses and the second source consists of accurate 3D motion capture data. To integrate both sources, we propose a dual-source approach that combines 2D pose estimation with efficient and robust 3D pose retrieval. In our experiments, we show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results and is even competitive when the skeleton structures of the two sources differ substantially. In the last part of the dissertation, we focus on how the different techniques, developed for the human motion capturing, retrieval and reconstruction can be adapted to handle the quadruped motion capture data and which new applications may appear. We discuss some particularities which must be considered during capturing the large animal motions. For retrieval, we derive the suitable feature sets in order to perform fast searches into the MoCap dataset for similar motion segments. At the end, we present a data-driven approach to reconstruct the quadruped motions from the video input data

HIGH QUALITY HUMAN 3D BODY MODELING, TRACKING AND APPLICATION

Geometric reconstruction of dynamic objects is a fundamental task of computer vision and graphics, and modeling human body of high fidelity is considered to be a core of this problem. Traditional human shape and motion capture techniques require an array of surrounding cameras or subjects wear reflective markers, resulting in a limitation of working space and portability. In this dissertation, a complete process is designed from geometric modeling detailed 3D human full body and capturing shape dynamics over time using a flexible setup to guiding clothes/person re-targeting with such data-driven models. As the mechanical movement of human body can be considered as an articulate motion, which is easy to guide the skin animation but has difficulties in the reverse process to find parameters from images without manual intervention, we present a novel parametric model, GMM-BlendSCAPE, jointly taking both linear skinning model and the prior art of BlendSCAPE (Blend Shape Completion and Animation for PEople) into consideration and develop a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to infer both body shape and pose from incomplete observations. We show the increased accuracy of joints and skin surface estimation using our model compared to the skeleton based motion tracking. To model the detailed body, we start with capturing high-quality partial 3D scans by using a single-view commercial depth camera. Based on GMM-BlendSCAPE, we can then reconstruct multiple complete static models of large pose difference via our novel non-rigid registration algorithm. With vertex correspondences established, these models can be further converted into a personalized drivable template and used for robust pose tracking in a similar GMM framework. Moreover, we design a general purpose real-time non-rigid deformation algorithm to accelerate this registration. Last but not least, we demonstrate a novel virtual clothes try-on application based on our personalized model utilizing both image and depth cues to synthesize and re-target clothes for single-view videos of different people

확률적인 3차원 자세 복원과 행동인식

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2016. 2. 오성회.These days, computer vision technology becomes popular and plays an important role in intelligent systems, such as augment reality, video and image analysis, and to name a few. Although cost effective depth cameras, like a Microsoft Kinect, have recently developed, most computer vision algorithms assume that observations are obtained from RGB cameras, which make 2D observations. If, somehow, we can estimate 3D information from 2D observations, it might give better solutions for many computer vision problems. In this dissertation, we focus on estimating 3D information from 2D observations, which is well known as non-rigid structure from motion (NRSfM). More formally, NRSfM finds the three dimensional structure of an object by analyzing image streams with the assumption that an object lies in a low-dimensional space. However, a human body for long periods of time can have complex shape variations and it makes a challenging problem for NRSfM due to its increased degree of freedom. In order to handle complex shape variations, we propose a Procrustean normal distribution mixture model (PNDMM) by extending a recently proposed Procrustean normal distribution (PND), which captures the distribution of non-rigid variations of an object by excluding the effects of rigid motion. Unlike existing methods which use a single model to solve an NRSfM problem, the proposed PNDMM decomposes complex shape variations into a collection of simpler ones, thereby model learning can be more tractable and accurate. We perform experiments showing that the proposed method outperforms existing methods on highly complex and long human motion sequences. In addition, we extend the PNDMM to a single view 3D human pose estimation problem. While recovering a 3D structure of a human body from an image is important, it is a highly ambiguous problem due to the deformation of an articulated human body. Moreover, before estimating a 3D human pose from a 2D human pose, it is important to obtain an accurate 2D human pose. In order to address inaccuracy of 2D pose estimation on a single image and 3D human pose ambiguities, we estimate multiple 2D and 3D human pose candidates and select the best one which can be explained by a 2D human pose detector and a 3D shape model. We also introduce a model transformation which is incorporated into the 3D shape prior model, such that the proposed method can be applied to a novel test image. Experimental results show that the proposed method can provide good 3D reconstruction results when tested on a novel test image, despite inaccuracies of 2D part detections and 3D shape ambiguities. Finally, we handle an action recognition problem from a video clip. Current studies show that high-level features obtained from estimated 2D human poses enable action recognition performance beyond current state-of-the-art methods using low- and mid-level features based on appearance and motion, despite inaccuracy of human pose estimation. Based on these findings, we propose an action recognition method using estimated 3D human pose information since the proposed PNDMM is able to reconstruct 3D shapes from 2D shapes. Experimental results show that 3D pose based descriptors are better than 2D pose based descriptors for action recognition, regardless of classification methods. Considering the fact that we use simple 3D pose descriptors based on a 3D shape model which is learned from 2D shapes, results reported in this dissertation are promising and obtaining accurate 3D information from 2D observations is still an important research issue for reliable computer vision systems.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Research Issues 4 1.3 Organization of the Dissertation 6 Chapter 2 Preliminary 9 2.1 Generalized Procrustes Analysis (GPA) 11 2.2 EM-GPA Algorithm 12 2.2.1 Objective function 12 2.2.2 E-step 15 2.2.3 M-step 16 2.3 Implementation Considerations for EM-GPA 18 2.3.1 Preprocessing stage 18 2.3.2 Small update rate for the covariance matrix 20 2.4 Experiments 21 2.4.1 Shape alignment with the missing information 23 2.4.2 3D shape modeling 24 2.4.3 2D+3D active appearance models 28 2.5 Chapter Summary and Discussion 32 Chapter 3 Procrustean Normal Distribution Mixture Model 33 3.1 Non-Rigid Structure from Motion 35 3.2 Procrustean Normal Distribution (PND) 38 3.3 PND Mixture Model 41 3.4 Learning a PNDMM 43 3.4.1 E-step 44 3.4.2 M-step 46 3.5 Learning an Adaptive PNDMM 48 3.6 Experiments 50 3.6.1 Experimental setup 50 3.6.2 CMU Mocap database 53 3.6.3 UMPM dataset 69 3.6.4 Simple and short motions 74 3.6.5 Real sequence - qualitative representation 77 3.7 Chapter Summary 78 Chapter 4 Recovering a 3D Human Pose from a Novel Image 83 4.1 Single View 3D Human Pose Estimation 85 4.2 Candidate Generation 87 4.2.1 Initial pose generation 87 4.2.2 Part recombination 88 4.3 3D Shape Prior Model 89 4.3.1 Procrustean mixture model learning 89 4.3.2 Procrustean mixture model fitting 91 4.4 Model Transformation 92 4.4.1 Model normalization 92 4.4.2 Model adaptation 95 4.5 Result Selection 96 4.6 Experiments 98 4.6.1 Implementation details 98 4.6.2 Evaluation of the joint 2D and 3D pose estimation 99 4.6.3 Evaluation of the 2D pose estimation 104 4.6.4 Evaluation of the 3D pose estimation 106 4.7 Chapter Summary 108 Chapter 5 Application to Action Recognition 109 5.1 Appearance and Motion Based Descriptors 112 5.2 2D Pose Based Descriptors 113 5.3 Bag-of-Features with a Multiple Kernel Method 114 5.4 Classification - Kernel Group Sparse Representation 115 5.4.1 Group sparse representation for classification 116 5.4.2 Kernel group sparse (KGS) representation for classification 118 5.5 Experiment on sub-JHMDB Dataset 120 5.5.1 Experimental setup 120 5.5.2 3D pose based descriptor 122 5.5.3 Experimental results 123 5.6 Chapter Summary 129 Chapter 6 Conclusion and Future Work 131 Appendices 135 A Proof of Propositions in Chapter 2 137 A.1 Proof of Proposition 1 137 A.2 Proof of Proposition 3 138 A.3 Proof of Proposition 4 139 B Calculation of p(XijDii) in Chapter 3 141 B.1 Without the Dirac-delta term 141 B.2 With the Dirac-delta term 142 C Procrustean Mixture Model Learning and Fitting in Chapter 4 145 C.1 Procrustean Mixture Model Learning 145 C.2 Procrustean Mixture Model Fitting 147 Bibliography 153 초 록 167Docto

MonoPerfCap: Human Performance Capture from Monocular Video

We present the first marker-less approach for temporally coherent 3D performance capture of a human with general clothing from monocular video. Our approach reconstructs articulated human skeleton motion as well as medium-scale non-rigid surface deformations in general scenes. Human performance capture is a challenging problem due to the large range of articulation, potentially fast motion, and considerable non-rigid deformations, even from multi-view data. Reconstruction from monocular video alone is drastically more challenging, since strong occlusions and the inherent depth ambiguity lead to a highly ill-posed reconstruction problem. We tackle these challenges by a novel approach that employs sparse 2D and 3D human pose detections from a convolutional neural network using a batch-based pose estimation strategy. Joint recovery of per-batch motion allows to resolve the ambiguities of the monocular reconstruction problem based on a low dimensional trajectory subspace. In addition, we propose refinement of the surface geometry based on fully automatically extracted silhouettes to enable medium-scale non-rigid alignment. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance capture results that enable exciting applications such as video editing and free viewpoint video, previously infeasible from monocular video. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluation demonstrates that our approach significantly outperforms previous monocular methods in terms of accuracy, robustness and scene complexity that can be handled.Comment: Accepted to ACM TOG 2018, to be presented on SIGGRAPH 201