Emotion Transfer for Hand Animation

We propose a new data-driven framework for synthesizing hand motion at different emotion levels. Specifically, we first capture high-quality hand motion using VR gloves. The hand motion data is then annotated with the emotion type and a latent space is constructed from the motions to facilitate the motion synthesis process. By interpolating the latent representation of the hand motion, new hand animation with different levels of emotion strength can be generated. Experimental results show that our framework can produce smooth and consistent hand motions at an interactive rate

Learning to Use Chopsticks in Diverse Gripping Styles

Learning dexterous manipulation skills is a long-standing challenge in computer graphics and robotics, especially when the task involves complex and delicate interactions between the hands, tools and objects. In this paper, we focus on chopsticks-based object relocation tasks, which are common yet demanding. The key to successful chopsticks skills is steady gripping of the sticks that also supports delicate maneuvers. We automatically discover physically valid chopsticks holding poses by Bayesian Optimization (BO) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), which works for multiple gripping styles and hand morphologies without the need of example data. Given as input the discovered gripping poses and desired objects to be moved, we build physics-based hand controllers to accomplish relocation tasks in two stages. First, kinematic trajectories are synthesized for the chopsticks and hand in a motion planning stage. The key components of our motion planner include a grasping model to select suitable chopsticks configurations for grasping the object, and a trajectory optimization module to generate collision-free chopsticks trajectories. Then we train physics-based hand controllers through DRL again to track the desired kinematic trajectories produced by the motion planner. We demonstrate the capabilities of our framework by relocating objects of various shapes and sizes, in diverse gripping styles and holding positions for multiple hand morphologies. Our system achieves faster learning speed and better control robustness, when compared to vanilla systems that attempt to learn chopstick-based skills without a gripping pose optimization module and/or without a kinematic motion planner

Emotion Transfer for 3D Hand Motion using StarGAN

In this paper, we propose a new data-driven framework for 3D hand motion emotion transfer. Specifically, we first capture high-quality hand motion using VR gloves. The hand motion data is then annotated with the emotion type and converted to images to facilitate the motion synthesis process and the new dataset will be available to the public. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public dataset with annotated hand motions. We further formulate the emotion transfer for 3D hand motion as an Image-to-Image translation problem, and it is done by adapting the StarGAN framework. Our new framework is able to synthesize new motions, given target emotion type and an unseen input motion. Experimental results show that our framework can produce high quality and consistent hand motions

Emotion Transfer for 3D Hand and Full Body Motion using StarGAN

In this paper, we propose a new data-driven framework for 3D hand and full-body motion emotion transfer. Specifically, we formulate the motion synthesis task as an image-to-image translation problem. By presenting a motion sequence as an image representation, the emotion can be transferred by our framework using StarGAN. To evaluate our proposed method's effectiveness, we first conducted a user study to validate the perceived emotion from the captured and synthesized hand motions. We further evaluate the synthesized hand and full body motions qualitatively and quantitatively. Experimental results show that our synthesized motions are comparable to the captured motions and those created by an existing method in terms of naturalness and visual quality

Robust Hand Motion Capture and Physics-Based Control for Grasping in Real Time

Hand motion capture technologies are being explored due to high demands in the fields such as video game, virtual reality, sign language recognition, human-computer interaction, and robotics. However, existing systems suffer a few limitations, e.g. they are high-cost (expensive capture devices), intrusive (additional wear-on sensors or complex configurations), and restrictive (limited motion varieties and restricted capture space). This dissertation mainly focus on exploring algorithms and applications for the hand motion capture system that is low-cost, non-intrusive, low-restriction, high-accuracy, and robust. More specifically, we develop a realtime and fully-automatic hand tracking system using a low-cost depth camera. We first introduce an efficient shape-indexed cascaded pose regressor that directly estimates 3D hand poses from depth images. A unique property of our hand pose regressor is to utilize a low-dimensional parametric hand geometric model to learn 3D shape-indexed features robust to variations in hand shapes, viewpoints and hand poses. We further introduce a hybrid tracking scheme that effectively complements our hand pose regressor with model-based hand tracking. In addition, we develop a rapid 3D hand shape modeling method that uses a small number of depth images to accurately construct a subject-specific skinned mesh model for hand tracking. This step not only automates the whole tracking system but also improves the robustness and accuracy of model-based tracking and hand pose regression. Additionally, we also propose a physically realistic human grasping synthesis method that is capable to grasp a wide variety of objects. Given an object to be grasped, our method is capable to compute required controls (e.g. forces and torques) that advance the simulation to achieve realistic grasping. Our method combines the power of data-driven synthesis and physics-based grasping control. We first introduce a data-driven method to synthesize a realistic grasping motion from large sets of prerecorded grasping motion data. And then we transform the synthesized kinematic motion to a physically realistic one by utilizing our online physics-based motion control method. In addition, we also provide a performance interface which allows the user to act out before a depth camera to control a virtual object

Robust Hand Motion Capture and Physics-Based Control for Grasping in Real Time

Hand motion capture technologies are being explored due to high demands in the fields such as video game, virtual reality, sign language recognition, human-computer interaction, and robotics. However, existing systems suffer a few limitations, e.g. they are high-cost (expensive capture devices), intrusive (additional wear-on sensors or complex configurations), and restrictive (limited motion varieties and restricted capture space). This dissertation mainly focus on exploring algorithms and applications for the hand motion capture system that is low-cost, non-intrusive, low-restriction, high-accuracy, and robust. More specifically, we develop a realtime and fully-automatic hand tracking system using a low-cost depth camera. We first introduce an efficient shape-indexed cascaded pose regressor that directly estimates 3D hand poses from depth images. A unique property of our hand pose regressor is to utilize a low-dimensional parametric hand geometric model to learn 3D shape-indexed features robust to variations in hand shapes, viewpoints and hand poses. We further introduce a hybrid tracking scheme that effectively complements our hand pose regressor with model-based hand tracking. In addition, we develop a rapid 3D hand shape modeling method that uses a small number of depth images to accurately construct a subject-specific skinned mesh model for hand tracking. This step not only automates the whole tracking system but also improves the robustness and accuracy of model-based tracking and hand pose regression. Additionally, we also propose a physically realistic human grasping synthesis method that is capable to grasp a wide variety of objects. Given an object to be grasped, our method is capable to compute required controls (e.g. forces and torques) that advance the simulation to achieve realistic grasping. Our method combines the power of data-driven synthesis and physics-based grasping control. We first introduce a data-driven method to synthesize a realistic grasping motion from large sets of prerecorded grasping motion data. And then we transform the synthesized kinematic motion to a physically realistic one by utilizing our online physics-based motion control method. In addition, we also provide a performance interface which allows the user to act out before a depth camera to control a virtual object