49 research outputs found
BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion
We show, for the first time, that neural networks trained only on synthetic
data achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the problem of 3D human pose and
shape (HPS) estimation from real images. Previous synthetic datasets have been
small, unrealistic, or lacked realistic clothing. Achieving sufficient realism
is non-trivial and we show how to do this for full bodies in motion.
Specifically, our BEDLAM dataset contains monocular RGB videos with
ground-truth 3D bodies in SMPL-X format. It includes a diversity of body
shapes, motions, skin tones, hair, and clothing. The clothing is realistically
simulated on the moving bodies using commercial clothing physics simulation. We
render varying numbers of people in realistic scenes with varied lighting and
camera motions. We then train various HPS regressors using BEDLAM and achieve
state-of-the-art accuracy on real-image benchmarks despite training with
synthetic data. We use BEDLAM to gain insights into what model design choices
are important for accuracy. With good synthetic training data, we find that a
basic method like HMR approaches the accuracy of the current SOTA method
(CLIFF). BEDLAM is useful for a variety of tasks and all images, ground truth
bodies, 3D clothing, support code, and more are available for research
purposes. Additionally, we provide detailed information about our synthetic
data generation pipeline, enabling others to generate their own datasets. See
the project page: https://bedlam.is.tue.mpg.de/
Towards Racially Unbiased Skin Tone Estimation via Scene Disambiguation
Virtual facial avatars will play an increasingly important role in immersive
communication, games and the metaverse, and it is therefore critical that they
be inclusive. This requires accurate recovery of the appearance, represented by
albedo, regardless of age, sex, or ethnicity. While significant progress has
been made on estimating 3D facial geometry, albedo estimation has received less
attention. The task is fundamentally ambiguous because the observed color is a
function of albedo and lighting, both of which are unknown. We find that
current methods are biased towards light skin tones due to (1) strongly biased
priors that prefer lighter pigmentation and (2) algorithmic solutions that
disregard the light/albedo ambiguity. To address this, we propose a new
evaluation dataset (FAIR) and an algorithm (TRUST) to improve albedo estimation
and, hence, fairness. Specifically, we create the first facial albedo
evaluation benchmark where subjects are balanced in terms of skin color, and
measure accuracy using the Individual Typology Angle (ITA) metric. We then
address the light/albedo ambiguity by building on a key observation: the image
of the full scene -- as opposed to a cropped image of the face -- contains
important information about lighting that can be used for disambiguation. TRUST
regresses facial albedo by conditioning both on the face region and a global
illumination signal obtained from the scene image. Our experimental results
show significant improvement compared to state-of-the-art methods on albedo
estimation, both in terms of accuracy and fairness. The evaluation benchmark
and code will be made available for research purposes at
https://trust.is.tue.mpg.de.Comment: Camera-Ready version, accepted at ECCV202
Populating 3D Scenes by Learning Human-Scene Interaction
Humans live within a 3D space and constantly interact with it to perform
tasks. Such interactions involve physical contact between surfaces that is
semantically meaningful. Our goal is to learn how humans interact with scenes
and leverage this to enable virtual characters to do the same. To that end, we
introduce a novel Human-Scene Interaction (HSI) model that encodes proximal
relationships, called POSA for "Pose with prOximitieS and contActs". The
representation of interaction is body-centric, which enables it to generalize
to new scenes. Specifically, POSA augments the SMPL-X parametric human body
model such that, for every mesh vertex, it encodes (a) the contact probability
with the scene surface and (b) the corresponding semantic scene label. We learn
POSA with a VAE conditioned on the SMPL-X vertices, and train on the PROX
dataset, which contains SMPL-X meshes of people interacting with 3D scenes, and
the corresponding scene semantics from the PROX-E dataset. We demonstrate the
value of POSA with two applications. First, we automatically place 3D scans of
people in scenes. We use a SMPL-X model fit to the scan as a proxy and then
find its most likely placement in 3D. POSA provides an effective representation
to search for "affordances" in the scene that match the likely contact
relationships for that pose. We perform a perceptual study that shows
significant improvement over the state of the art on this task. Second, we show
that POSA's learned representation of body-scene interaction supports monocular
human pose estimation that is consistent with a 3D scene, improving on the
state of the art. Our model and code are available for research purposes at
https://posa.is.tue.mpg.de
Lebensqualität von Kinderlosen im Alter geringer: Verteilungen und Determinanten der Lebensqualität im Alter im internationalen Vergleich
'Die Alterung der Gesellschaft wird die Bedingungen des menschlichen Zusammenlebens grundlegend ändern. Auch werden alternde Gesellschaften neue, zum Teil noch gar nicht absehbare, politische und wirtschaftliche Herausforderungen zu bestehen haben: 'Alter' und 'Altern' gelten als ein gesellschaftliches Zukunftsthema und geraten zunehmend in das Blickfeld der wissenschaftlichen und politischen Öffentlichkeit. Vor allem das höhere Lebensalter hat sich als eine eigenständige Lebensphase herausgebildet - gekennzeichnet einerseits durch neue biographische Entwürfe und Formen sozialer Beteiligung, andererseits aber auch geprägt durch Krankheit, Hilfebedürftigkeit und Tod. Mit der Verlängerung der Lebenserwartung bekommt auch die Frage nach den Bedingungen und Möglichkeiten, unter denen Autonomie und Lebensqualität im höheren Lebensalter aufrechterhalten werden, eine neue Bedeutung. Dabei ist auch über Zielgrößen, nicht zuletzt vom Autor dieses Beitrags zu diskutieren: Lebensqualität muss als Maß des Erfolgs sozialpolitischer Intervention verstanden und thematisiert werden, und zwar vor dem Hintergrund der Frage nach der Finanzierbarkeit sozialstaatlicher Leistungen und der Effizienz verschiedener Alternativen.' (Autorenreferat
Virtual Reality Exposure to a Healthy Weight Body Is a Promising Adjunct Treatment for Anorexia Nervosa
Introduction/objective: Treatment results of anorexia nervosa (AN) are modest, with fear of weight gain being a strong predictor of treatment outcome and relapse. Here, we present a virtual reality (VR) setup for exposure to healthy weight and evaluate its potential as an adjunct treatment for AN. Methods: In two studies, we investigate VR experience and clinical effects of VR exposure to higher weight in 20 women with high weight concern or shape concern and in 20 women with AN. Results: In study 1, 90% of participants (18/20) reported symptoms of high arousal but verbalized low to medium levels of fear. Study 2 demonstrated that VR exposure to healthy weight induced high arousal in patients with AN and yielded a trend that four sessions of exposure improved fear of weight gain. Explorative analyses revealed three clusters of individual reactions to exposure, which need further exploration. Conclusions: VR exposure is a well-accepted and powerful tool for evoking fear of weight gain in patients with AN. We observed a statistical trend that repeated virtual exposure to healthy weight improved fear of weight gain with large effect sizes. Further studies are needed to determine the mechanisms and differential effects
Second International Consensus Conference on Advanced Breast Cancer (ABC2), Lisbon, 11/09/2013: The German Perspective
The Advanced Breast Cancer Second International Consensus Conference (ABC2) on diagnosis and treatment of advanced breast cancer took place in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 7-9, 2013. The focus of the conference was inoperable, locally advanced breast cancer. The diagnosis and treatment of metastatic breast cancer had already been discussed 2 years before at the ABC1 Consensus and were only updated regarding special issues as part of this year's ABC2 Consensus. Like 2 years ago, a working group of German breast cancer experts commented on the voting results of the ABC panelists, with special consideration of the German guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer (German Gynecological Oncology Working Group (AGO) recommendations, S3 Guideline) in order to adapt them for daily clinical practice in Germany. The goal of both the ABC Consensus and the German comments is to facilitate evidence-based therapy decisions