arXiv subjects

Helge Rhodin

Publications and source records attributed to Helge Rhodin.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

PCLs: Geometry-aware Neural Reconstruction of 3D Pose with Perspective Crop Layers

Local processing is an essential feature of CNNs and other neural network architectures - it is one of the reasons why they work so well on images where relevant information is, to a large extent, local. However, perspective effects stemming from the projection in a conventional camera vary for different global positions in the image. We introduce Perspective Crop Layers (PCLs) - a form of perspective crop of the region of interest based on the camera geometry - and show that accounting for the perspective consistently improves the accuracy of state-of-the-art 3D pose reconstruction methods. PCLs are modular neural network layers, which, when inserted into existing CNN and MLP architectures, deterministically remove the location-dependent perspective effects while leaving end-to-end training and the number of parameters of the underlying neural network unchanged. We demonstrate that PCL leads to improved 3D human pose reconstruction accuracy for CNN architectures that use cropping operations, such as spatial transformer networks (STN), and, somewhat surprisingly, MLPs used for 2D-to-3D keypoint lifting. Our conclusion is that it is important to utilize camera calibration information when available, for classical and deep-learning-based computer vision alike. PCL offers an easy way to improve the accuracy of existing 3D reconstruction networks by making them geometry aware. Our code is publicly available at github.com/yu-frank/PerspectiveCropLayers.

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arXiv2020

CanonPose: Self-Supervised Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild

Human pose estimation from single images is a challenging problem in computer vision that requires large amounts of labeled training data to be solved accurately. Unfortunately, for many human activities (\eg outdoor sports) such training data does not exist and is hard or even impossible to acquire with traditional motion capture systems. We propose a self-supervised approach that learns a single image 3D pose estimator from unlabeled multi-view data. To this end, we exploit multi-view consistency constraints to disentangle the observed 2D pose into the underlying 3D pose and camera rotation. In contrast to most existing methods, we do not require calibrated cameras and can therefore learn from moving cameras. Nevertheless, in the case of a static camera setup, we present an optional extension to include constant relative camera rotations over multiple views into our framework. Key to the success are new, unbiased reconstruction objectives that mix information across views and training samples. The proposed approach is evaluated on two benchmark datasets (Human3.6M and MPII-INF-3DHP) and on the in-the-wild SkiPose dataset.

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arXiv2020

Self-supervised Segmentation via Background Inpainting

While supervised object detection and segmentation methods achieve impressive accuracy, they generalize poorly to images whose appearance significantly differs from the data they have been trained on. To address this when annotating data is prohibitively expensive, we introduce a self-supervised detection and segmentation approach that can work with single images captured by a potentially moving camera. At the heart of our approach lies the observation that object segmentation and background reconstruction are linked tasks, and that, for structured scenes, background regions can be re-synthesized from their surroundings, whereas regions depicting the moving object cannot. We encode this intuition into a self-supervised loss function that we exploit to train a proposal-based segmentation network. To account for the discrete nature of the proposals, we develop a Monte Carlo-based training strategy that allows the algorithm to explore the large space of object proposals. We apply our method to human detection and segmentation in images that visually depart from those of standard benchmarks and outperform existing self-supervised methods.

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arXiv2020

Ellipse Detection and Localization with Applications to Knots in Sawn Lumber Images

While general object detection has seen tremendous progress, localization of elliptical objects has received little attention in the literature. Our motivating application is the detection of knots in sawn timber images, which is an important problem since the number and types of knots are visual characteristics that adversely affect the quality of sawn timber. We demonstrate how models can be tailored to the elliptical shape and thereby improve on general purpose detectors; more generally, elliptical defects are common in industrial production, such as enclosed air bubbles when casting glass or plastic. In this paper, we adapt the Faster R-CNN with its Region Proposal Network (RPN) to model elliptical objects with a Gaussian function, and extend the existing Gaussian Proposal Network (GPN) architecture by adding the region-of-interest pooling and regression branches, as well as using the Wasserstein distance as the loss function to predict the precise locations of elliptical objects. Our proposed method has promising results on the lumber knot dataset: knots are detected with an average intersection over union of 73.05%, compared to 63.63% for general purpose detectors. Specific to the lumber application, we also propose an algorithm to correct any misalignment in the raw timber images during scanning, and contribute the first open-source lumber knot dataset by labeling the elliptical knots in the preprocessed images.

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arXiv2020

ActiveMoCap: Optimized Viewpoint Selection for Active Human Motion Capture

The accuracy of monocular 3D human pose estimation depends on the viewpoint from which the image is captured. While freely moving cameras, such as on drones, provide control over this viewpoint, automatically positioning them at the location which will yield the highest accuracy remains an open problem. This is the problem that we address in this paper. Specifically, given a short video sequence, we introduce an algorithm that predicts which viewpoints should be chosen to capture future frames so as to maximize 3D human pose estimation accuracy. The key idea underlying our approach is a method to estimate the uncertainty of the 3D body pose estimates. We integrate several sources of uncertainty, originating from deep learning based regressors and temporal smoothness. Our motion planner yields improved 3D body pose estimates and outperforms or matches existing ones that are based on person following and orbiting.

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arXiv2020

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.

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arXiv2020

Front2Back: Single View 3D Shape Reconstruction via Front to Back Prediction

Reconstruction of a 3D shape from a single 2D image is a classical computer vision problem, whose difficulty stems from the inherent ambiguity of recovering occluded or only partially observed surfaces. Recent methods address this challenge through the use of largely unstructured neural networks that effectively distill conditional mapping and priors over 3D shape. In this work, we induce structure and geometric constraints by leveraging three core observations: (1) the surface of most everyday objects is often almost entirely exposed from pairs of typical opposite views; (2) everyday objects often exhibit global reflective symmetries which can be accurately predicted from single views; (3) opposite orthographic views of a 3D shape share consistent silhouettes. Following these observations, we first predict orthographic 2.5D visible surface maps (depth, normal and silhouette) from perspective 2D images, and detect global reflective symmetries in this data; second, we predict the back facing depth and normal maps using as input the front maps and, when available, the symmetric reflections of these maps; and finally, we reconstruct a 3D mesh from the union of these maps using a surface reconstruction method best suited for this data. Our experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the art approaches for 3D shape reconstructions from 2D and 2.5D data in terms of input fidelity and details preservation. Specifically, we achieve 12% better performance on average in ShapeNet benchmark dataset, and up to 19% for certain classes of objects (e.g., chairs and vessels).

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arXiv2020

Deformation-aware Unpaired Image Translation for Pose Estimation on Laboratory Animals

Our goal is to capture the pose of neuroscience model organisms, without using any manual supervision, to be able to study how neural circuits orchestrate behaviour. Human pose estimation attains remarkable accuracy when trained on real or simulated datasets consisting of millions of frames. However, for many applications simulated models are unrealistic and real training datasets with comprehensive annotations do not exist. We address this problem with a new sim2real domain transfer method. Our key contribution is the explicit and independent modeling of appearance, shape and poses in an unpaired image translation framework. Our model lets us train a pose estimator on the target domain by transferring readily available body keypoint locations from the source domain to generated target images. We compare our approach with existing domain transfer methods and demonstrate improved pose estimation accuracy on Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly), Caenorhabditis elegans (worm) and Danio rerio (zebrafish), without requiring any manual annotation on the target domain and despite using simplistic off-the-shelf animal characters for simulation, or simple geometric shapes as models. Our new datasets, code, and trained models will be published to support future neuroscientific studies.

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arXiv2019

Gravity as a Reference for Estimating a Person's Height from Video

Estimating the metric height of a person from monocular imagery without additional assumptions is ill-posed. Existing solutions either require manual calibration of ground plane and camera geometry, special cameras, or reference objects of known size. We focus on motion cues and exploit gravity on earth as an omnipresent reference 'object' to translate acceleration, and subsequently height, measured in image-pixels to values in meters. We require videos of motion as input, where gravity is the only external force. This limitation is different to those of existing solutions that recover a person's height and, therefore, our method opens up new application fields. We show theoretically and empirically that a simple motion trajectory analysis suffices to translate from pixel measurements to the person's metric height, reaching a MAE of up to 3.9 cm on jumping motions, and that this works without camera and ground plane calibration.

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arXiv2019

Motion Capture from Pan-Tilt Cameras with Unknown Orientation

In sports, such as alpine skiing, coaches would like to know the speed and various biomechanical variables of their athletes and competitors. Existing methods use either body-worn sensors, which are cumbersome to setup, or manual image annotation, which is time consuming. We propose a method for estimating an athlete's global 3D position and articulated pose using multiple cameras. By contrast to classical markerless motion capture solutions, we allow cameras to rotate freely so that large capture volumes can be covered. In a first step, tight crops around the skier are predicted and fed to a 2D pose estimator network. The 3D pose is then reconstructed using a bundle adjustment method. Key to our solution is the rotation estimation of Pan-Tilt cameras in a joint optimization with the athlete pose and conditioning on relative background motion computed with feature tracking. Furthermore, we created a new alpine skiing dataset and annotated it with 2D pose labels, to overcome shortcomings of existing ones. Our method estimates accurate global 3D poses from images only and provides coaches with an automatic and fast tool for measuring and improving an athlete's performance.

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arXiv2019

Self-supervised Training of Proposal-based Segmentation via Background Prediction

While supervised object detection methods achieve impressive accuracy, they generalize poorly to images whose appearance significantly differs from the data they have been trained on. To address this in scenarios where annotating data is prohibitively expensive, we introduce a self-supervised approach to object detection and segmentation, able to work with monocular images captured with a moving camera. At the heart of our approach lies the observation that segmentation and background reconstruction are linked tasks, and the idea that, because we observe a structured scene, background regions can be re-synthesized from their surroundings, whereas regions depicting the object cannot. We therefore encode this intuition as a self-supervised loss function that we exploit to train a proposal-based segmentation network. To account for the discrete nature of object proposals, we develop a Monte Carlo-based training strategy that allows us to explore the large space of object proposals. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach yields accurate detections and segmentations in images that visually depart from those of standard benchmarks, outperforming existing self-supervised methods and approaching weakly supervised ones that exploit large annotated datasets.

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arXiv2019

Neural Scene Decomposition for Multi-Person Motion Capture

Learning general image representations has proven key to the success of many computer vision tasks. For example, many approaches to image understanding problems rely on deep networks that were initially trained on ImageNet, mostly because the learned features are a valuable starting point to learn from limited labeled data. However, when it comes to 3D motion capture of multiple people, these features are only of limited use. In this paper, we therefore propose an approach to learning features that are useful for this purpose. To this end, we introduce a self-supervised approach to learning what we call a neural scene decomposition (NSD) that can be exploited for 3D pose estimation. NSD comprises three layers of abstraction to represent human subjects: spatial layout in terms of bounding-boxes and relative depth; a 2D shape representation in terms of an instance segmentation mask; and subject-specific appearance and 3D pose information. By exploiting self-supervision coming from multiview data, our NSD model can be trained end-to-end without any 2D or 3D supervision. In contrast to previous approaches, it works for multiple persons and full-frame images. Because it encodes 3D geometry, NSD can then be effectively leveraged to train a 3D pose estimation network from small amounts of annotated data.

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arXiv2019

Mo2Cap2: Real-time Mobile 3D Motion Capture with a Cap-mounted Fisheye Camera

We propose the first real-time approach for the egocentric estimation of 3D human body pose in a wide range of unconstrained everyday activities. This setting has a unique set of challenges, such as mobility of the hardware setup, and robustness to long capture sessions with fast recovery from tracking failures. We tackle these challenges based on a novel lightweight setup that converts a standard baseball cap to a device for high-quality pose estimation based on a single cap-mounted fisheye camera. From the captured egocentric live stream, our CNN based 3D pose estimation approach runs at 60Hz on a consumer-level GPU. In addition to the novel hardware setup, our other main contributions are: 1) a large ground truth training corpus of top-down fisheye images and 2) a novel disentangled 3D pose estimation approach that takes the unique properties of the egocentric viewpoint into account. As shown by our evaluation, we achieve lower 3D joint error as well as better 2D overlay than the existing baselines.

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arXiv2018

What Face and Body Shapes Can Tell About Height

Recovering a person's height from a single image is important for virtual garment fitting, autonomous driving and surveillance, however, it is also very challenging due to the absence of absolute scale information. We tackle the rarely addressed case, where camera parameters and scene geometry is unknown. To nevertheless resolve the inherent scale ambiguity, we infer height from statistics that are intrinsic to human anatomy and can be estimated from images directly, such as articulated pose, bone length proportions, and facial features. Our contribution is twofold. First, we experiment with different machine learning models to capture the relation between image content and human height. Second, we show that performance is predominantly limited by dataset size and create a new dataset that is three magnitudes larger, by mining explicit height labels and propagating them to additional images through face recognition and assignment consistency. Our evaluation shows that monocular height estimation is possible with a MAE of 5.56cm.

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arXiv2018

Unsupervised Geometry-Aware Representation for 3D Human Pose Estimation

Modern 3D human pose estimation techniques rely on deep networks, which require large amounts of training data. While weakly-supervised methods require less supervision, by utilizing 2D poses or multi-view imagery without annotations, they still need a sufficiently large set of samples with 3D annotations for learning to succeed. In this paper, we propose to overcome this problem by learning a geometry-aware body representation from multi-view images without annotations. To this end, we use an encoder-decoder that predicts an image from one viewpoint given an image from another viewpoint. Because this representation encodes 3D geometry, using it in a semi-supervised setting makes it easier to learn a mapping from it to 3D human pose. As evidenced by our experiments, our approach significantly outperforms fully-supervised methods given the same amount of labeled data, and improves over other semi-supervised methods while using as little as 1% of the labeled data.

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arXiv2018

Learning Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation from Multi-view Images

Accurate 3D human pose estimation from single images is possible with sophisticated deep-net architectures that have been trained on very large datasets. However, this still leaves open the problem of capturing motions for which no such database exists. Manual annotation is tedious, slow, and error-prone. In this paper, we propose to replace most of the annotations by the use of multiple views, at training time only. Specifically, we train the system to predict the same pose in all views. Such a consistency constraint is necessary but not sufficient to predict accurate poses. We therefore complement it with a supervised loss aiming to predict the correct pose in a small set of labeled images, and with a regularization term that penalizes drift from initial predictions. Furthermore, we propose a method to estimate camera pose jointly with human pose, which lets us utilize multi-view footage where calibration is difficult, e.g., for pan-tilt or moving handheld cameras. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on established benchmarks, as well as on a new Ski dataset with rotating cameras and expert ski motion, for which annotations are truly hard to obtain.

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arXiv2018

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.

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arXiv2017

Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision

We propose a CNN-based approach for 3D human body pose estimation from single RGB images that addresses the issue of limited generalizability of models trained solely on the starkly limited publicly available 3D pose data. Using only the existing 3D pose data and 2D pose data, we show state-of-the-art performance on established benchmarks through transfer of learned features, while also generalizing to in-the-wild scenes. We further introduce a new training set for human body pose estimation from monocular images of real humans that has the ground truth captured with a multi-camera marker-less motion capture system. It complements existing corpora with greater diversity in pose, human appearance, clothing, occlusion, and viewpoints, and enables an increased scope of augmentation. We also contribute a new benchmark that covers outdoor and indoor scenes, and demonstrate that our 3D pose dataset shows better in-the-wild performance than existing annotated data, which is further improved in conjunction with transfer learning from 2D pose data. All in all, we argue that the use of transfer learning of representations in tandem with algorithmic and data contributions is crucial for general 3D body pose estimation.

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