VirtualHome: Simulating Household Activities via Programs

In this paper, we are interested in modeling complex activities that occur in a typical household. We propose to use programs, i.e., sequences of atomic actions and interactions, as a high level representation of complex tasks. Programs are interesting because they provide a non-ambiguous representation of a task, and allow agents to execute them. However, nowadays, there is no database providing this type of information. Towards this goal, we first crowd-source programs for a variety of activities that happen in people's homes, via a game-like interface used for teaching kids how to code. Using the collected dataset, we show how we can learn to extract programs directly from natural language descriptions or from videos. We then implement the most common atomic (inter)actions in the Unity3D game engine, and use our programs to "drive" an artificial agent to execute tasks in a simulated household environment. Our VirtualHome simulator allows us to create a large activity video dataset with rich ground-truth, enabling training and testing of video understanding models. We further showcase examples of our agent performing tasks in our VirtualHome based on language descriptions.Comment: CVPR 2018 (Oral

Learning based automatic face annotation for arbitrary poses and expressions from frontal images only

Statistical approaches for building non-rigid deformable models, such as the active appearance model (AAM), have enjoyed great popularity in recent years, but typically require tedious manual annotation of training images. In this paper, a learning based approach for the automatic annotation of visually deformable objects from a single annotated frontal image is presented and demonstrated on the example of automatically annotating face images that can be used for building AAMs for fitting and tracking. This approach employs the idea of initially learning the correspondences between landmarks in a frontal image and a set of training images with a face in arbitrary poses. Using this learner, virtual images of unseen faces at any arbitrary pose for which the learner was trained can be reconstructed by predicting the new landmark locations and warping the texture from the frontal image. View-based AAMs are then built from the virtual images and used for automatically annotating unseen images, including images of different facial expressions, at any random pose within the maximum range spanned by the virtually reconstructed images. The approach is experimentally validated by automatically annotating face images from three different databases

Interactive videos: Plausible video editing using sparse structure points

Video remains the method of choice for capturing temporal events. However, without access to the underlying 3D scene models, it remains difficult to make object level edits in a single video or across multiple videos. While it may be possible to explicitly reconstruct the 3D geometries to facilitate these edits, such a workflow is cumbersome, expensive, and tedious. In this work, we present a much simpler workflow to create plausible editing and mixing of raw video footage using only sparse structure points (SSP) directly recovered from the raw sequences. First, we utilize user-scribbles to structure the point representations obtained using structure-from-motion on the input videos. The resultant structure points, even when noisy and sparse, are then used to enable various video edits in 3D, including view perturbation, keyframe animation, object duplication and transfer across videos, etc. Specifically, we describe how to synthesize object images from new views adopting a novel image-based rendering technique using the SSPs as proxy for the missing 3D scene information. We propose a structure-preserving image warping on multiple input frames adaptively selected from object video, followed by a spatio-temporally coherent image stitching to compose the final object image. Simple planar shadows and depth maps are synthesized for objects to generate plausible video sequence mimicking real-world interactions. We demonstrate our system on a variety of input videos to produce complex edits, which are otherwise difficult to achieve