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

Sparse Inertial Poser: Automatic 3D Human Pose Estimation from Sparse IMUs

We address the problem of making human motion capture in the wild more practical by using a small set of inertial sensors attached to the body. Since the problem is heavily under-constrained, previous methods either use a large number of sensors, which is intrusive, or they require additional video input. We take a different approach and constrain the problem by: (i) making use of a realistic statistical body model that includes anthropometric constraints and (ii) using a joint optimization framework to fit the model to orientation and acceleration measurements over multiple frames. The resulting tracker Sparse Inertial Poser (SIP) enables 3D human pose estimation using only 6 sensors (attached to the wrists, lower legs, back and head) and works for arbitrary human motions. Experiments on the recently released TNT15 dataset show that, using the same number of sensors, SIP achieves higher accuracy than the dataset baseline without using any video data. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of SIP on newly recorded challenging motions in outdoor scenarios such as climbing or jumping over a wall.Comment: 12 pages, Accepted at Eurographics 201

3D Object Reconstruction from Hand-Object Interactions

Recent advances have enabled 3d object reconstruction approaches using a single off-the-shelf RGB-D camera. Although these approaches are successful for a wide range of object classes, they rely on stable and distinctive geometric or texture features. Many objects like mechanical parts, toys, household or decorative articles, however, are textureless and characterized by minimalistic shapes that are simple and symmetric. Existing in-hand scanning systems and 3d reconstruction techniques fail for such symmetric objects in the absence of highly distinctive features. In this work, we show that extracting 3d hand motion for in-hand scanning effectively facilitates the reconstruction of even featureless and highly symmetric objects and we present an approach that fuses the rich additional information of hands into a 3d reconstruction pipeline, significantly contributing to the state-of-the-art of in-hand scanning.Comment: International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2015, http://files.is.tue.mpg.de/dtzionas/In-Hand-Scannin

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

Augmented reality (AR) for surgical robotic and autonomous systems: State of the art, challenges, and solutions

Despite the substantial progress achieved in the development and integration of augmented reality (AR) in surgical robotic and autonomous systems (RAS), the center of focus in most devices remains on improving end-effector dexterity and precision, as well as improved access to minimally invasive surgeries. This paper aims to provide a systematic review of different types of state-of-the-art surgical robotic platforms while identifying areas for technological improvement. We associate specific control features, such as haptic feedback, sensory stimuli, and human-robot collaboration, with AR technology to perform complex surgical interventions for increased user perception of the augmented world. Current researchers in the field have, for long, faced innumerable issues with low accuracy in tool placement around complex trajectories, pose estimation, and difficulty in depth perception during two-dimensional medical imaging. A number of robots described in this review, such as Novarad and SpineAssist, are analyzed in terms of their hardware features, computer vision systems (such as deep learning algorithms), and the clinical relevance of the literature. We attempt to outline the shortcomings in current optimization algorithms for surgical robots (such as YOLO and LTSM) whilst providing mitigating solutions to internal tool-to-organ collision detection and image reconstruction. The accuracy of results in robot end-effector collisions and reduced occlusion remain promising within the scope of our research, validating the propositions made for the surgical clearance of ever-expanding AR technology in the future

Real-time 3D human body pose estimation from monocular RGB input

Human motion capture finds extensive application in movies, games, sports and biomechanical analysis. However, existing motion capture solutions require cumbersome external and/or on-body instrumentation, or use active sensors with limits on the possible capture volume dictated by power consumption. The ubiquity and ease of deployment of RGB cameras makes monocular RGB based human motion capture an extremely useful problem to solve, which would lower the barrier-to entry for content creators to employ motion capture tools, and enable newer applications of human motion capture. This thesis demonstrates the first real-time monocular RGB based motion-capture solutions that work in general scene settings. They are based on developing neural network based approaches to address the ill-posed problem of estimating 3D human pose from a single RGB image, in combination with model based fitting. In particular, the contributions of this work make advances towards three key aspects of real-time monocular RGB based motion capture, namely speed, accuracy, and the ability to work for general scenes. New training datasets are proposed, for single-person and multi-person scenarios, which, together with the proposed transfer learning based training pipeline, allow learning based approaches to be appearance invariant. The training datasets are accompanied by evaluation benchmarks with multiple avenues of fine-grained evaluation. The evaluation benchmarks differ visually from the training datasets, so as to promote efforts towards solutions that generalize to in-the-wild scenes. The proposed task formulations for the single-person and multi-person case allow higher accuracy, and incorporate additional qualities such as occlusion robustness, that are helpful in the context of a full motion capture solution. The multi-person formulations are designed to have a nearly constant inference time regardless of the number of subjects in the scene, and combined with contributions towards fast neural network inference, enable real-time 3D pose estimation for multiple subjects. Combining the proposed learning-based approaches with a model-based kinematic skeleton fitting step provides temporally stable joint angle estimates, which can be readily employed for driving virtual characters.Menschlicher Motion Capture findet umfangreiche Anwendung in Filmen, Spielen, Sport und biomechanischen Analysen. Bestehende Motion-Capture-Lösungen erfordern jedoch umständliche externe Instrumentierung und / oder Instrumentierung am Körper, oder verwenden aktive Sensoren deren begrenztes Erfassungsvolumen durch den Stromverbrauch begrenzt wird. Die Allgegenwart und einfache Bereitstellung von RGB-Kameras macht die monokulare RGB-basierte Motion Capture zu einem äußerst nützlichen Problem. Dies würde die Eintrittsbarriere für Inhaltsersteller für die Verwendung der Motion Capture verringern und neuere Anwendungen dieser Tools zur Analyse menschlicher Bewegungen ermöglichen. Diese Arbeit zeigt die ersten monokularen RGB-basierten Motion-Capture-Lösungen in Echtzeit, die in allgemeinen Szeneneinstellungen funktionieren. Sie basieren auf der Entwicklung neuronaler netzwerkbasierter Ansätze, um das schlecht gestellte Problem der Schätzung der menschlichen 3D-Pose aus einem einzelnen RGB-Bild in Kombination mit einer modellbasierten Anpassung anzugehen. Insbesondere machen die Beiträge dieser Arbeit Fortschritte in Richtung drei Schlüsselaspekte der monokularen RGB-basierten Echtzeit-Bewegungserfassung, nämlich Geschwindigkeit, Genauigkeit und die Fähigkeit, für allgemeine Szenen zu arbeiten. Es werden neue Trainingsdatensätze für Einzel- und Mehrpersonen-Szenarien vorgeschlagen, die zusammen mit der vorgeschlagenen Trainingspipeline, die auf Transferlernen basiert, ermöglichen, dass lernbasierte Ansätze nicht von Unterschieden im Erscheinungsbild des Bildes beeinflusst werden. Die Trainingsdatensätze werden von Bewertungsbenchmarks mit mehreren Möglichkeiten einer feinkörnigen Bewertung begleitet. Die angegebenen Benchmarks unterscheiden sich visuell von den Trainingsaufzeichnungen, um die Entwicklung von Lösungen zu fördern, die sich auf verschiedene Szenen verallgemeinern lassen. Die vorgeschlagenen Aufgabenformulierungen für den Einzel- und Mehrpersonenfall ermöglichen eine höhere Genauigkeit und enthalten zusätzliche Eigenschaften wie die Robustheit der Okklusion, die im Kontext einer vollständigen Bewegungserfassungslösung hilfreich sind. Die Mehrpersonenformulierungen sind so konzipiert, dass sie unabhängig von der Anzahl der Subjekte in der Szene eine nahezu konstante Inferenzzeit haben. In Kombination mit Beiträgen zur schnellen Inferenz neuronaler Netze ermöglichen sie eine 3D-Posenschätzung in Echtzeit für mehrere Subjekte. Die Kombination der vorgeschlagenen lernbasierten Ansätze mit einem modellbasierten kinematischen Skelettanpassungsschritt liefert zeitlich stabile Gelenkwinkelschätzungen, die leicht zum Ansteuern virtueller Charaktere verwendet werden können

Motion capture and human pose reconstruction from a single-view video sequence

Cataloged from PDF version of article.We propose a framework to reconstruct the 3D pose of a human for animation from a sequence of single-view video frames. The framework for pose construction starts with background estimation and the performer's silhouette is extracted using image subtraction for each frame. Then the body silhouettes are automatically labeled 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. It assumes that the input video has a static background, it has no significant perspective effects, and the performer is in an upright position. The proposed approach requires minimal user interaction. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved