22 research outputs found
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
Implicit Filter Sparsification In Convolutional Neural Networks
We show implicit filter level sparsity manifests in convolutional neural
networks (CNNs) which employ Batch Normalization and ReLU activation, and are
trained with adaptive gradient descent techniques and L2 regularization or
weight decay. Through an extensive empirical study (Mehta et al., 2019) we
hypothesize the mechanism behind the sparsification process, and find
surprising links to certain filter sparsification heuristics proposed in
literature. Emergence of, and the subsequent pruning of selective features is
observed to be one of the contributing mechanisms, leading to feature sparsity
at par or better than certain explicit sparsification / pruning approaches. In
this workshop article we summarize our findings, and point out corollaries of
selective-featurepenalization which could also be employed as heuristics for
filter pruningComment: ODML-CDNNR 2019 (ICML'19 workshop) extended abstract of the CVPR 2019
paper "On Implicit Filter Level Sparsity in Convolutional Neural Networks,
Mehta et al." (arXiv:1811.12495
In the Wild Human Pose Estimation Using Explicit 2D Features and Intermediate 3D Representations
Convolutional Neural Network based approaches for monocular 3D human pose
estimation usually require a large amount of training images with 3D pose
annotations. While it is feasible to provide 2D joint annotations for large
corpora of in-the-wild images with humans, providing accurate 3D annotations to
such in-the-wild corpora is hardly feasible in practice. Most existing 3D
labelled data sets are either synthetically created or feature in-studio
images. 3D pose estimation algorithms trained on such data often have limited
ability to generalize to real world scene diversity. We therefore propose a new
deep learning based method for monocular 3D human pose estimation that shows
high accuracy and generalizes better to in-the-wild scenes. It has a network
architecture that comprises a new disentangled hidden space encoding of
explicit 2D and 3D features, and uses supervision by a new learned projection
model from predicted 3D pose. Our algorithm can be jointly trained on image
data with 3D labels and image data with only 2D labels. It achieves
state-of-the-art accuracy on challenging in-the-wild data.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 201
GANerated Hands for Real-time 3D Hand Tracking from Monocular RGB
We address the highly challenging problem of real-time 3D hand tracking based
on a monocular RGB-only sequence. Our tracking method combines a convolutional
neural network with a kinematic 3D hand model, such that it generalizes well to
unseen data, is robust to occlusions and varying camera viewpoints, and leads
to anatomically plausible as well as temporally smooth hand motions. For
training our CNN we propose a novel approach for the synthetic generation of
training data that is based on a geometrically consistent image-to-image
translation network. To be more specific, we use a neural network that
translates synthetic images to "real" images, such that the so-generated images
follow the same statistical distribution as real-world hand images. For
training this translation network we combine an adversarial loss and a
cycle-consistency loss with a geometric consistency loss in order to preserve
geometric properties (such as hand pose) during translation. We demonstrate
that our hand tracking system outperforms the current state-of-the-art on
challenging RGB-only footage
Single-Shot Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation From Monocular RGB
We propose a new single-shot method for multi-person 3D pose estimation in
general scenes from a monocular RGB camera. Our approach uses novel
occlusion-robust pose-maps (ORPM) which enable full body pose inference even
under strong partial occlusions by other people and objects in the scene. ORPM
outputs a fixed number of maps which encode the 3D joint locations of all
people in the scene. Body part associations allow us to infer 3D pose for an
arbitrary number of people without explicit bounding box prediction. To train
our approach we introduce MuCo-3DHP, the first large scale training data set
showing real images of sophisticated multi-person interactions and occlusions.
We synthesize a large corpus of multi-person images by compositing images of
individual people (with ground truth from mutli-view performance capture). We
evaluate our method on our new challenging 3D annotated multi-person test set
MuPoTs-3D where we achieve state-of-the-art performance. To further stimulate
research in multi-person 3D pose estimation, we will make our new datasets, and
associated code publicly available for research purposes.Comment: International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), 201
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
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
XNect: Real-time Multi-Person 3D Motion Capture with a Single RGB Camera
We present a real-time approach for multi-person 3D motion capture at over 30
fps using a single RGB camera. It operates successfully in generic scenes which
may contain occlusions by objects and by other people. Our method operates in
subsequent stages. The first stage is a convolutional neural network (CNN) that
estimates 2D and 3D pose features along with identity assignments for all
visible joints of all individuals.We contribute a new architecture for this
CNN, called SelecSLS Net, that uses novel selective long and short range skip
connections to improve the information flow allowing for a drastically faster
network without compromising accuracy. In the second stage, a fully connected
neural network turns the possibly partial (on account of occlusion) 2Dpose and
3Dpose features for each subject into a complete 3Dpose estimate per
individual. The third stage applies space-time skeletal model fitting to the
predicted 2D and 3D pose per subject to further reconcile the 2D and 3D pose,
and enforce temporal coherence. Our method returns the full skeletal pose in
joint angles for each subject. This is a further key distinction from previous
work that do not produce joint angle results of a coherent skeleton in real
time for multi-person scenes. The proposed system runs on consumer hardware at
a previously unseen speed of more than 30 fps given 512x320 images as input
while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy, which we will demonstrate on a range
of challenging real-world scenes.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH) 202