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Mar 13

Speech2Lip: High-fidelity Speech to Lip Generation by Learning from a Short Video

Synthesizing realistic videos according to a given speech is still an open challenge. Previous works have been plagued by issues such as inaccurate lip shape generation and poor image quality. The key reason is that only motions and appearances on limited facial areas (e.g., lip area) are mainly driven by the input speech. Therefore, directly learning a mapping function from speech to the entire head image is prone to ambiguity, particularly when using a short video for training. We thus propose a decomposition-synthesis-composition framework named Speech to Lip (Speech2Lip) that disentangles speech-sensitive and speech-insensitive motion/appearance to facilitate effective learning from limited training data, resulting in the generation of natural-looking videos. First, given a fixed head pose (i.e., canonical space), we present a speech-driven implicit model for lip image generation which concentrates on learning speech-sensitive motion and appearance. Next, to model the major speech-insensitive motion (i.e., head movement), we introduce a geometry-aware mutual explicit mapping (GAMEM) module that establishes geometric mappings between different head poses. This allows us to paste generated lip images at the canonical space onto head images with arbitrary poses and synthesize talking videos with natural head movements. In addition, a Blend-Net and a contrastive sync loss are introduced to enhance the overall synthesis performance. Quantitative and qualitative results on three benchmarks demonstrate that our model can be trained by a video of just a few minutes in length and achieve state-of-the-art performance in both visual quality and speech-visual synchronization. Code: https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/Speech2Lip.

3D^2-Actor: Learning Pose-Conditioned 3D-Aware Denoiser for Realistic Gaussian Avatar Modeling

Advancements in neural implicit representations and differentiable rendering have markedly improved the ability to learn animatable 3D avatars from sparse multi-view RGB videos. However, current methods that map observation space to canonical space often face challenges in capturing pose-dependent details and generalizing to novel poses. While diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities in 2D image generation, their potential for creating animatable 3D avatars from 2D inputs remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce 3D^2-Actor, a novel approach featuring a pose-conditioned 3D-aware human modeling pipeline that integrates iterative 2D denoising and 3D rectifying steps. The 2D denoiser, guided by pose cues, generates detailed multi-view images that provide the rich feature set necessary for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction and pose rendering. Complementing this, our Gaussian-based 3D rectifier renders images with enhanced 3D consistency through a two-stage projection strategy and a novel local coordinate representation. Additionally, we propose an innovative sampling strategy to ensure smooth temporal continuity across frames in video synthesis. Our method effectively addresses the limitations of traditional numerical solutions in handling ill-posed mappings, producing realistic and animatable 3D human avatars. Experimental results demonstrate that 3D^2-Actor excels in high-fidelity avatar modeling and robustly generalizes to novel poses. Code is available at: https://github.com/silence-tang/GaussianActor.

GALA: Generating Animatable Layered Assets from a Single Scan

We present GALA, a framework that takes as input a single-layer clothed 3D human mesh and decomposes it into complete multi-layered 3D assets. The outputs can then be combined with other assets to create novel clothed human avatars with any pose. Existing reconstruction approaches often treat clothed humans as a single-layer of geometry and overlook the inherent compositionality of humans with hairstyles, clothing, and accessories, thereby limiting the utility of the meshes for downstream applications. Decomposing a single-layer mesh into separate layers is a challenging task because it requires the synthesis of plausible geometry and texture for the severely occluded regions. Moreover, even with successful decomposition, meshes are not normalized in terms of poses and body shapes, failing coherent composition with novel identities and poses. To address these challenges, we propose to leverage the general knowledge of a pretrained 2D diffusion model as geometry and appearance prior for humans and other assets. We first separate the input mesh using the 3D surface segmentation extracted from multi-view 2D segmentations. Then we synthesize the missing geometry of different layers in both posed and canonical spaces using a novel pose-guided Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss. Once we complete inpainting high-fidelity 3D geometry, we also apply the same SDS loss to its texture to obtain the complete appearance including the initially occluded regions. Through a series of decomposition steps, we obtain multiple layers of 3D assets in a shared canonical space normalized in terms of poses and human shapes, hence supporting effortless composition to novel identities and reanimation with novel poses. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for decomposition, canonicalization, and composition tasks compared to existing solutions.

3DPortraitGAN: Learning One-Quarter Headshot 3D GANs from a Single-View Portrait Dataset with Diverse Body Poses

3D-aware face generators are typically trained on 2D real-life face image datasets that primarily consist of near-frontal face data, and as such, they are unable to construct one-quarter headshot 3D portraits with complete head, neck, and shoulder geometry. Two reasons account for this issue: First, existing facial recognition methods struggle with extracting facial data captured from large camera angles or back views. Second, it is challenging to learn a distribution of 3D portraits covering the one-quarter headshot region from single-view data due to significant geometric deformation caused by diverse body poses. To this end, we first create the dataset 360{\deg}-Portrait-HQ (360{\deg}PHQ for short) which consists of high-quality single-view real portraits annotated with a variety of camera parameters (the yaw angles span the entire 360{\deg} range) and body poses. We then propose 3DPortraitGAN, the first 3D-aware one-quarter headshot portrait generator that learns a canonical 3D avatar distribution from the 360{\deg}PHQ dataset with body pose self-learning. Our model can generate view-consistent portrait images from all camera angles with a canonical one-quarter headshot 3D representation. Our experiments show that the proposed framework can accurately predict portrait body poses and generate view-consistent, realistic portrait images with complete geometry from all camera angles.

Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image

Reconstructing accurate 3D scenes from images is a long-standing vision task. Due to the ill-posedness of the single-image reconstruction problem, most well-established methods are built upon multi-view geometry. State-of-the-art (SOTA) monocular metric depth estimation methods can only handle a single camera model and are unable to perform mixed-data training due to the metric ambiguity. Meanwhile, SOTA monocular methods trained on large mixed datasets achieve zero-shot generalization by learning affine-invariant depths, which cannot recover real-world metrics. In this work, we show that the key to a zero-shot single-view metric depth model lies in the combination of large-scale data training and resolving the metric ambiguity from various camera models. We propose a canonical camera space transformation module, which explicitly addresses the ambiguity problems and can be effortlessly plugged into existing monocular models. Equipped with our module, monocular models can be stably trained with over 8 million images with thousands of camera models, resulting in zero-shot generalization to in-the-wild images with unseen camera settings. Experiments demonstrate SOTA performance of our method on 7 zero-shot benchmarks. Notably, our method won the championship in the 2nd Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge. Our method enables the accurate recovery of metric 3D structures on randomly collected internet images, paving the way for plausible single-image metrology. The potential benefits extend to downstream tasks, which can be significantly improved by simply plugging in our model. For example, our model relieves the scale drift issues of monocular-SLAM (Fig. 1), leading to high-quality metric scale dense mapping. The code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/Metric3D.

WildFusion: Learning 3D-Aware Latent Diffusion Models in View Space

Modern learning-based approaches to 3D-aware image synthesis achieve high photorealism and 3D-consistent viewpoint changes for the generated images. Existing approaches represent instances in a shared canonical space. However, for in-the-wild datasets a shared canonical system can be difficult to define or might not even exist. In this work, we instead model instances in view space, alleviating the need for posed images and learned camera distributions. We find that in this setting, existing GAN-based methods are prone to generating flat geometry and struggle with distribution coverage. We hence propose WildFusion, a new approach to 3D-aware image synthesis based on latent diffusion models (LDMs). We first train an autoencoder that infers a compressed latent representation, which additionally captures the images' underlying 3D structure and enables not only reconstruction but also novel view synthesis. To learn a faithful 3D representation, we leverage cues from monocular depth prediction. Then, we train a diffusion model in the 3D-aware latent space, thereby enabling synthesis of high-quality 3D-consistent image samples, outperforming recent state-of-the-art GAN-based methods. Importantly, our 3D-aware LDM is trained without any direct supervision from multiview images or 3D geometry and does not require posed images or learned pose or camera distributions. It directly learns a 3D representation without relying on canonical camera coordinates. This opens up promising research avenues for scalable 3D-aware image synthesis and 3D content creation from in-the-wild image data. See https://katjaschwarz.github.io/wildfusion for videos of our 3D results.

PoseScript: Linking 3D Human Poses and Natural Language

Natural language plays a critical role in many computer vision applications, such as image captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval, to provide fine-grained semantic information. Unfortunately, while human pose is key to human understanding, current 3D human pose datasets lack detailed language descriptions. To address this issue, we have introduced the PoseScript dataset. This dataset pairs more than six thousand 3D human poses from AMASS with rich human-annotated descriptions of the body parts and their spatial relationships. Additionally, to increase the size of the dataset to a scale that is compatible with data-hungry learning algorithms, we have proposed an elaborate captioning process that generates automatic synthetic descriptions in natural language from given 3D keypoints. This process extracts low-level pose information, known as "posecodes", using a set of simple but generic rules on the 3D keypoints. These posecodes are then combined into higher level textual descriptions using syntactic rules. With automatic annotations, the amount of available data significantly scales up (100k), making it possible to effectively pretrain deep models for finetuning on human captions. To showcase the potential of annotated poses, we present three multi-modal learning tasks that utilize the PoseScript dataset. Firstly, we develop a pipeline that maps 3D poses and textual descriptions into a joint embedding space, allowing for cross-modal retrieval of relevant poses from large-scale datasets. Secondly, we establish a baseline for a text-conditioned model generating 3D poses. Thirdly, we present a learned process for generating pose descriptions. These applications demonstrate the versatility and usefulness of annotated poses in various tasks and pave the way for future research in the field.

Metric3D v2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimation

We introduce Metric3D v2, a geometric foundation model for zero-shot metric depth and surface normal estimation from a single image, which is crucial for metric 3D recovery. While depth and normal are geometrically related and highly complimentary, they present distinct challenges. SoTA monocular depth methods achieve zero-shot generalization by learning affine-invariant depths, which cannot recover real-world metrics. Meanwhile, SoTA normal estimation methods have limited zero-shot performance due to the lack of large-scale labeled data. To tackle these issues, we propose solutions for both metric depth estimation and surface normal estimation. For metric depth estimation, we show that the key to a zero-shot single-view model lies in resolving the metric ambiguity from various camera models and large-scale data training. We propose a canonical camera space transformation module, which explicitly addresses the ambiguity problem and can be effortlessly plugged into existing monocular models. For surface normal estimation, we propose a joint depth-normal optimization module to distill diverse data knowledge from metric depth, enabling normal estimators to learn beyond normal labels. Equipped with these modules, our depth-normal models can be stably trained with over 16 million of images from thousands of camera models with different-type annotations, resulting in zero-shot generalization to in-the-wild images with unseen camera settings. Our method enables the accurate recovery of metric 3D structures on randomly collected internet images, paving the way for plausible single-image metrology. Our project page is at https://JUGGHM.github.io/Metric3Dv2.

From Text to Pose to Image: Improving Diffusion Model Control and Quality

In the last two years, text-to-image diffusion models have become extremely popular. As their quality and usage increase, a major concern has been the need for better output control. In addition to prompt engineering, one effective method to improve the controllability of diffusion models has been to condition them on additional modalities such as image style, depth map, or keypoints. This forms the basis of ControlNets or Adapters. When attempting to apply these methods to control human poses in outputs of text-to-image diffusion models, two main challenges have arisen. The first challenge is generating poses following a wide range of semantic text descriptions, for which previous methods involved searching for a pose within a dataset of (caption, pose) pairs. The second challenge is conditioning image generation on a specified pose while keeping both high aesthetic and high pose fidelity. In this article, we fix these two main issues by introducing a text-to-pose (T2P) generative model alongside a new sampling algorithm, and a new pose adapter that incorporates more pose keypoints for higher pose fidelity. Together, these two new state-of-the-art models enable, for the first time, a generative text-to-pose-to-image framework for higher pose control in diffusion models. We release all models and the code used for the experiments at https://github.com/clement-bonnet/text-to-pose.

ADen: Adaptive Density Representations for Sparse-view Camera Pose Estimation

Recovering camera poses from a set of images is a foundational task in 3D computer vision, which powers key applications such as 3D scene/object reconstructions. Classic methods often depend on feature correspondence, such as keypoints, which require the input images to have large overlap and small viewpoint changes. Such requirements present considerable challenges in scenarios with sparse views. Recent data-driven approaches aim to directly output camera poses, either through regressing the 6DoF camera poses or formulating rotation as a probability distribution. However, each approach has its limitations. On one hand, directly regressing the camera poses can be ill-posed, since it assumes a single mode, which is not true under symmetry and leads to sub-optimal solutions. On the other hand, probabilistic approaches are capable of modeling the symmetry ambiguity, yet they sample the entire space of rotation uniformly by brute-force. This leads to an inevitable trade-off between high sample density, which improves model precision, and sample efficiency that determines the runtime. In this paper, we propose ADen to unify the two frameworks by employing a generator and a discriminator: the generator is trained to output multiple hypotheses of 6DoF camera pose to represent a distribution and handle multi-mode ambiguity, and the discriminator is trained to identify the hypothesis that best explains the data. This allows ADen to combine the best of both worlds, achieving substantially higher precision as well as lower runtime than previous methods in empirical evaluations.

MetaCap: Meta-learning Priors from Multi-View Imagery for Sparse-view Human Performance Capture and Rendering

Faithful human performance capture and free-view rendering from sparse RGB observations is a long-standing problem in Vision and Graphics. The main challenges are the lack of observations and the inherent ambiguities of the setting, e.g. occlusions and depth ambiguity. As a result, radiance fields, which have shown great promise in capturing high-frequency appearance and geometry details in dense setups, perform poorly when naively supervising them on sparse camera views, as the field simply overfits to the sparse-view inputs. To address this, we propose MetaCap, a method for efficient and high-quality geometry recovery and novel view synthesis given very sparse or even a single view of the human. Our key idea is to meta-learn the radiance field weights solely from potentially sparse multi-view videos, which can serve as a prior when fine-tuning them on sparse imagery depicting the human. This prior provides a good network weight initialization, thereby effectively addressing ambiguities in sparse-view capture. Due to the articulated structure of the human body and motion-induced surface deformations, learning such a prior is non-trivial. Therefore, we propose to meta-learn the field weights in a pose-canonicalized space, which reduces the spatial feature range and makes feature learning more effective. Consequently, one can fine-tune our field parameters to quickly generalize to unseen poses, novel illumination conditions as well as novel and sparse (even monocular) camera views. For evaluating our method under different scenarios, we collect a new dataset, WildDynaCap, which contains subjects captured in, both, a dense camera dome and in-the-wild sparse camera rigs, and demonstrate superior results compared to recent state-of-the-art methods on, both, public and WildDynaCap dataset.

Follow-Your-Pose v2: Multiple-Condition Guided Character Image Animation for Stable Pose Control

Pose-controllable character video generation is in high demand with extensive applications for fields such as automatic advertising and content creation on social media platforms. While existing character image animation methods using pose sequences and reference images have shown promising performance, they tend to struggle with incoherent animation in complex scenarios, such as multiple character animation and body occlusion. Additionally, current methods request large-scale high-quality videos with stable backgrounds and temporal consistency as training datasets, otherwise, their performance will greatly deteriorate. These two issues hinder the practical utilization of character image animation tools. In this paper, we propose a practical and robust framework Follow-Your-Pose v2, which can be trained on noisy open-sourced videos readily available on the internet. Multi-condition guiders are designed to address the challenges of background stability, body occlusion in multi-character generation, and consistency of character appearance. Moreover, to fill the gap of fair evaluation of multi-character pose animation, we propose a new benchmark comprising approximately 4,000 frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a margin of over 35\% across 2 datasets and on 7 metrics. Meanwhile, qualitative assessments reveal a significant improvement in the quality of generated video, particularly in scenarios involving complex backgrounds and body occlusion of multi-character, suggesting the superiority of our approach.

NPGA: Neural Parametric Gaussian Avatars

The creation of high-fidelity, digital versions of human heads is an important stepping stone in the process of further integrating virtual components into our everyday lives. Constructing such avatars is a challenging research problem, due to a high demand for photo-realism and real-time rendering performance. In this work, we propose Neural Parametric Gaussian Avatars (NPGA), a data-driven approach to create high-fidelity, controllable avatars from multi-view video recordings. We build our method around 3D Gaussian Splatting for its highly efficient rendering and to inherit the topological flexibility of point clouds. In contrast to previous work, we condition our avatars' dynamics on the rich expression space of neural parametric head models (NPHM), instead of mesh-based 3DMMs. To this end, we distill the backward deformation field of our underlying NPHM into forward deformations which are compatible with rasterization-based rendering. All remaining fine-scale, expression-dependent details are learned from the multi-view videos. To increase the representational capacity of our avatars, we augment the canonical Gaussian point cloud using per-primitive latent features which govern its dynamic behavior. To regularize this increased dynamic expressivity, we propose Laplacian terms on the latent features and predicted dynamics. We evaluate our method on the public NeRSemble dataset, demonstrating that NPGA significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art avatars on the self-reenactment task by 2.6 PSNR. Furthermore, we demonstrate accurate animation capabilities from real-world monocular videos.

PostoMETRO: Pose Token Enhanced Mesh Transformer for Robust 3D Human Mesh Recovery

With the recent advancements in single-image-based human mesh recovery, there is a growing interest in enhancing its performance in certain extreme scenarios, such as occlusion, while maintaining overall model accuracy. Although obtaining accurately annotated 3D human poses under occlusion is challenging, there is still a wealth of rich and precise 2D pose annotations that can be leveraged. However, existing works mostly focus on directly leveraging 2D pose coordinates to estimate 3D pose and mesh. In this paper, we present PostoMETRO(Pose token enhanced MEsh TRansfOrmer), which integrates occlusion-resilient 2D pose representation into transformers in a token-wise manner. Utilizing a specialized pose tokenizer, we efficiently condense 2D pose data to a compact sequence of pose tokens and feed them to the transformer together with the image tokens. This process not only ensures a rich depiction of texture from the image but also fosters a robust integration of pose and image information. Subsequently, these combined tokens are queried by vertex and joint tokens to decode 3D coordinates of mesh vertices and human joints. Facilitated by the robust pose token representation and the effective combination, we are able to produce more precise 3D coordinates, even under extreme scenarios like occlusion. Experiments on both standard and occlusion-specific benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of PostoMETRO. Qualitative results further illustrate the clarity of how 2D pose can help 3D reconstruction. Code will be made available.

AvatarBooth: High-Quality and Customizable 3D Human Avatar Generation

We introduce AvatarBooth, a novel method for generating high-quality 3D avatars using text prompts or specific images. Unlike previous approaches that can only synthesize avatars based on simple text descriptions, our method enables the creation of personalized avatars from casually captured face or body images, while still supporting text-based model generation and editing. Our key contribution is the precise avatar generation control by using dual fine-tuned diffusion models separately for the human face and body. This enables us to capture intricate details of facial appearance, clothing, and accessories, resulting in highly realistic avatar generations. Furthermore, we introduce pose-consistent constraint to the optimization process to enhance the multi-view consistency of synthesized head images from the diffusion model and thus eliminate interference from uncontrolled human poses. In addition, we present a multi-resolution rendering strategy that facilitates coarse-to-fine supervision of 3D avatar generation, thereby enhancing the performance of the proposed system. The resulting avatar model can be further edited using additional text descriptions and driven by motion sequences. Experiments show that AvatarBooth outperforms previous text-to-3D methods in terms of rendering and geometric quality from either text prompts or specific images. Please check our project website at https://zeng-yifei.github.io/avatarbooth_page/.

PoseExaminer: Automated Testing of Out-of-Distribution Robustness in Human Pose and Shape Estimation

Human pose and shape (HPS) estimation methods achieve remarkable results. However, current HPS benchmarks are mostly designed to test models in scenarios that are similar to the training data. This can lead to critical situations in real-world applications when the observed data differs significantly from the training data and hence is out-of-distribution (OOD). It is therefore important to test and improve the OOD robustness of HPS methods. To address this fundamental problem, we develop a simulator that can be controlled in a fine-grained manner using interpretable parameters to explore the manifold of images of human pose, e.g. by varying poses, shapes, and clothes. We introduce a learning-based testing method, termed PoseExaminer, that automatically diagnoses HPS algorithms by searching over the parameter space of human pose images to find the failure modes. Our strategy for exploring this high-dimensional parameter space is a multi-agent reinforcement learning system, in which the agents collaborate to explore different parts of the parameter space. We show that our PoseExaminer discovers a variety of limitations in current state-of-the-art models that are relevant in real-world scenarios but are missed by current benchmarks. For example, it finds large regions of realistic human poses that are not predicted correctly, as well as reduced performance for humans with skinny and corpulent body shapes. In addition, we show that fine-tuning HPS methods by exploiting the failure modes found by PoseExaminer improve their robustness and even their performance on standard benchmarks by a significant margin. The code are available for research purposes.

Generalizing Neural Human Fitting to Unseen Poses With Articulated SE(3) Equivariance

We address the problem of fitting a parametric human body model (SMPL) to point cloud data. Optimization-based methods require careful initialization and are prone to becoming trapped in local optima. Learning-based methods address this but do not generalize well when the input pose is far from those seen during training. For rigid point clouds, remarkable generalization has been achieved by leveraging SE(3)-equivariant networks, but these methods do not work on articulated objects. In this work we extend this idea to human bodies and propose ArtEq, a novel part-based SE(3)-equivariant neural architecture for SMPL model estimation from point clouds. Specifically, we learn a part detection network by leveraging local SO(3) invariance, and regress shape and pose using articulated SE(3) shape-invariant and pose-equivariant networks, all trained end-to-end. Our novel pose regression module leverages the permutation-equivariant property of self-attention layers to preserve rotational equivariance. Experimental results show that ArtEq generalizes to poses not seen during training, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by ~44% in terms of body reconstruction accuracy, without requiring an optimization refinement step. Furthermore, ArtEq is three orders of magnitude faster during inference than prior work and has 97.3% fewer parameters. The code and model are available for research purposes at https://arteq.is.tue.mpg.de.

LEAP: Liberate Sparse-view 3D Modeling from Camera Poses

Are camera poses necessary for multi-view 3D modeling? Existing approaches predominantly assume access to accurate camera poses. While this assumption might hold for dense views, accurately estimating camera poses for sparse views is often elusive. Our analysis reveals that noisy estimated poses lead to degraded performance for existing sparse-view 3D modeling methods. To address this issue, we present LEAP, a novel pose-free approach, therefore challenging the prevailing notion that camera poses are indispensable. LEAP discards pose-based operations and learns geometric knowledge from data. LEAP is equipped with a neural volume, which is shared across scenes and is parameterized to encode geometry and texture priors. For each incoming scene, we update the neural volume by aggregating 2D image features in a feature-similarity-driven manner. The updated neural volume is decoded into the radiance field, enabling novel view synthesis from any viewpoint. On both object-centric and scene-level datasets, we show that LEAP significantly outperforms prior methods when they employ predicted poses from state-of-the-art pose estimators. Notably, LEAP performs on par with prior approaches that use ground-truth poses while running 400times faster than PixelNeRF. We show LEAP generalizes to novel object categories and scenes, and learns knowledge closely resembles epipolar geometry. Project page: https://hwjiang1510.github.io/LEAP/

EpipolarNVS: leveraging on Epipolar geometry for single-image Novel View Synthesis

Novel-view synthesis (NVS) can be tackled through different approaches, depending on the general setting: a single source image to a short video sequence, exact or noisy camera pose information, 3D-based information such as point clouds etc. The most challenging scenario, the one where we stand in this work, only considers a unique source image to generate a novel one from another viewpoint. However, in such a tricky situation, the latest learning-based solutions often struggle to integrate the camera viewpoint transformation. Indeed, the extrinsic information is often passed as-is, through a low-dimensional vector. It might even occur that such a camera pose, when parametrized as Euler angles, is quantized through a one-hot representation. This vanilla encoding choice prevents the learnt architecture from inferring novel views on a continuous basis (from a camera pose perspective). We claim it exists an elegant way to better encode relative camera pose, by leveraging 3D-related concepts such as the epipolar constraint. We, therefore, introduce an innovative method that encodes the viewpoint transformation as a 2D feature image. Such a camera encoding strategy gives meaningful insights to the network regarding how the camera has moved in space between the two views. By encoding the camera pose information as a finite number of coloured epipolar lines, we demonstrate through our experiments that our strategy outperforms vanilla encoding.

CheckerPose: Progressive Dense Keypoint Localization for Object Pose Estimation with Graph Neural Network

Estimating the 6-DoF pose of a rigid object from a single RGB image is a crucial yet challenging task. Recent studies have shown the great potential of dense correspondence-based solutions, yet improvements are still needed to reach practical deployment. In this paper, we propose a novel pose estimation algorithm named CheckerPose, which improves on three main aspects. Firstly, CheckerPose densely samples 3D keypoints from the surface of the 3D object and finds their 2D correspondences progressively in the 2D image. Compared to previous solutions that conduct dense sampling in the image space, our strategy enables the correspondence searching in a 2D grid (i.e., pixel coordinate). Secondly, for our 3D-to-2D correspondence, we design a compact binary code representation for 2D image locations. This representation not only allows for progressive correspondence refinement but also converts the correspondence regression to a more efficient classification problem. Thirdly, we adopt a graph neural network to explicitly model the interactions among the sampled 3D keypoints, further boosting the reliability and accuracy of the correspondences. Together, these novel components make CheckerPose a strong pose estimation algorithm. When evaluated on the popular Linemod, Linemod-O, and YCB-V object pose estimation benchmarks, CheckerPose clearly boosts the accuracy of correspondence-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art performances. Code is available at https://github.com/RuyiLian/CheckerPose.

Category-Agnostic 6D Pose Estimation with Conditional Neural Processes

We present a novel meta-learning approach for 6D pose estimation on unknown objects. In contrast to ``instance-level" and ``category-level" pose estimation methods, our algorithm learns object representation in a category-agnostic way, which endows it with strong generalization capabilities across object categories. Specifically, we employ a neural process-based meta-learning approach to train an encoder to capture texture and geometry of an object in a latent representation, based on very few RGB-D images and ground-truth keypoints. The latent representation is then used by a simultaneously meta-trained decoder to predict the 6D pose of the object in new images. Furthermore, we propose a novel geometry-aware decoder for the keypoint prediction using a Graph Neural Network (GNN), which explicitly takes geometric constraints specific to each object into consideration. To evaluate our algorithm, extensive experiments are conducted on the \linemod dataset, and on our new fully-annotated synthetic datasets generated from Multiple Categories in Multiple Scenes (MCMS). Experimental results demonstrate that our model performs well on unseen objects with very different shapes and appearances. Remarkably, our model also shows robust performance on occluded scenes although trained fully on data without occlusion. To our knowledge, this is the first work exploring cross-category level 6D pose estimation.

Sparse-view Pose Estimation and Reconstruction via Analysis by Generative Synthesis

Inferring the 3D structure underlying a set of multi-view images typically requires solving two co-dependent tasks -- accurate 3D reconstruction requires precise camera poses, and predicting camera poses relies on (implicitly or explicitly) modeling the underlying 3D. The classical framework of analysis by synthesis casts this inference as a joint optimization seeking to explain the observed pixels, and recent instantiations learn expressive 3D representations (e.g., Neural Fields) with gradient-descent-based pose refinement of initial pose estimates. However, given a sparse set of observed views, the observations may not provide sufficient direct evidence to obtain complete and accurate 3D. Moreover, large errors in pose estimation may not be easily corrected and can further degrade the inferred 3D. To allow robust 3D reconstruction and pose estimation in this challenging setup, we propose SparseAGS, a method that adapts this analysis-by-synthesis approach by: a) including novel-view-synthesis-based generative priors in conjunction with photometric objectives to improve the quality of the inferred 3D, and b) explicitly reasoning about outliers and using a discrete search with a continuous optimization-based strategy to correct them. We validate our framework across real-world and synthetic datasets in combination with several off-the-shelf pose estimation systems as initialization. We find that it significantly improves the base systems' pose accuracy while yielding high-quality 3D reconstructions that outperform the results from current multi-view reconstruction baselines.

MagicPose4D: Crafting Articulated Models with Appearance and Motion Control

With the success of 2D and 3D visual generative models, there is growing interest in generating 4D content. Existing methods primarily rely on text prompts to produce 4D content, but they often fall short of accurately defining complex or rare motions. To address this limitation, we propose MagicPose4D, a novel framework for refined control over both appearance and motion in 4D generation. Unlike traditional methods, MagicPose4D accepts monocular videos as motion prompts, enabling precise and customizable motion generation. MagicPose4D comprises two key modules: i) Dual-Phase 4D Reconstruction Module} which operates in two phases. The first phase focuses on capturing the model's shape using accurate 2D supervision and less accurate but geometrically informative 3D pseudo-supervision without imposing skeleton constraints. The second phase refines the model using more accurate pseudo-3D supervision, obtained in the first phase and introduces kinematic chain-based skeleton constraints to ensure physical plausibility. Additionally, we propose a Global-local Chamfer loss that aligns the overall distribution of predicted mesh vertices with the supervision while maintaining part-level alignment without extra annotations. ii) Cross-category Motion Transfer Module} leverages the predictions from the 4D reconstruction module and uses a kinematic-chain-based skeleton to achieve cross-category motion transfer. It ensures smooth transitions between frames through dynamic rigidity, facilitating robust generalization without additional training. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MagicPose4D significantly improves the accuracy and consistency of 4D content generation, outperforming existing methods in various benchmarks.

3D Human Reconstruction in the Wild with Synthetic Data Using Generative Models

In this work, we show that synthetic data created by generative models is complementary to computer graphics (CG) rendered data for achieving remarkable generalization performance on diverse real-world scenes for 3D human pose and shape estimation (HPS). Specifically, we propose an effective approach based on recent diffusion models, termed HumanWild, which can effortlessly generate human images and corresponding 3D mesh annotations. We first collect a large-scale human-centric dataset with comprehensive annotations, e.g., text captions and surface normal images. Then, we train a customized ControlNet model upon this dataset to generate diverse human images and initial ground-truth labels. At the core of this step is that we can easily obtain numerous surface normal images from a 3D human parametric model, e.g., SMPL-X, by rendering the 3D mesh onto the image plane. As there exists inevitable noise in the initial labels, we then apply an off-the-shelf foundation segmentation model, i.e., SAM, to filter negative data samples. Our data generation pipeline is flexible and customizable to facilitate different real-world tasks, e.g., ego-centric scenes and perspective-distortion scenes. The generated dataset comprises 0.79M images with corresponding 3D annotations, covering versatile viewpoints, scenes, and human identities. We train various HPS regressors on top of the generated data and evaluate them on a wide range of benchmarks (3DPW, RICH, EgoBody, AGORA, SSP-3D) to verify the effectiveness of the generated data. By exclusively employing generative models, we generate large-scale in-the-wild human images and high-quality annotations, eliminating the need for real-world data collection.

Advancing Pose-Guided Image Synthesis with Progressive Conditional Diffusion Models

Recent work has showcased the significant potential of diffusion models in pose-guided person image synthesis. However, owing to the inconsistency in pose between the source and target images, synthesizing an image with a distinct pose, relying exclusively on the source image and target pose information, remains a formidable challenge. This paper presents Progressive Conditional Diffusion Models (PCDMs) that incrementally bridge the gap between person images under the target and source poses through three stages. Specifically, in the first stage, we design a simple prior conditional diffusion model that predicts the global features of the target image by mining the global alignment relationship between pose coordinates and image appearance. Then, the second stage establishes a dense correspondence between the source and target images using the global features from the previous stage, and an inpainting conditional diffusion model is proposed to further align and enhance the contextual features, generating a coarse-grained person image. In the third stage, we propose a refining conditional diffusion model to utilize the coarsely generated image from the previous stage as a condition, achieving texture restoration and enhancing fine-detail consistency. The three-stage PCDMs work progressively to generate the final high-quality and high-fidelity synthesized image. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the consistency and photorealism of our proposed PCDMs under challenging scenarios.The code and model will be available at https://github.com/muzishen/PCDMs.

Global Adaptation meets Local Generalization: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Human Pose Estimation

When applying a pre-trained 2D-to-3D human pose lifting model to a target unseen dataset, large performance degradation is commonly encountered due to domain shift issues. We observe that the degradation is caused by two factors: 1) the large distribution gap over global positions of poses between the source and target datasets due to variant camera parameters and settings, and 2) the deficient diversity of local structures of poses in training. To this end, we combine global adaptation and local generalization in PoseDA, a simple yet effective framework of unsupervised domain adaptation for 3D human pose estimation. Specifically, global adaptation aims to align global positions of poses from the source domain to the target domain with a proposed global position alignment (GPA) module. And local generalization is designed to enhance the diversity of 2D-3D pose mapping with a local pose augmentation (LPA) module. These modules bring significant performance improvement without introducing additional learnable parameters. In addition, we propose local pose augmentation (LPA) to enhance the diversity of 3D poses following an adversarial training scheme consisting of 1) a augmentation generator that generates the parameters of pre-defined pose transformations and 2) an anchor discriminator to ensure the reality and quality of the augmented data. Our approach can be applicable to almost all 2D-3D lifting models. PoseDA achieves 61.3 mm of MPJPE on MPI-INF-3DHP under a cross-dataset evaluation setup, improving upon the previous state-of-the-art method by 10.2\%.

En3D: An Enhanced Generative Model for Sculpting 3D Humans from 2D Synthetic Data

We present En3D, an enhanced generative scheme for sculpting high-quality 3D human avatars. Unlike previous works that rely on scarce 3D datasets or limited 2D collections with imbalanced viewing angles and imprecise pose priors, our approach aims to develop a zero-shot 3D generative scheme capable of producing visually realistic, geometrically accurate and content-wise diverse 3D humans without relying on pre-existing 3D or 2D assets. To address this challenge, we introduce a meticulously crafted workflow that implements accurate physical modeling to learn the enhanced 3D generative model from synthetic 2D data. During inference, we integrate optimization modules to bridge the gap between realistic appearances and coarse 3D shapes. Specifically, En3D comprises three modules: a 3D generator that accurately models generalizable 3D humans with realistic appearance from synthesized balanced, diverse, and structured human images; a geometry sculptor that enhances shape quality using multi-view normal constraints for intricate human anatomy; and a texturing module that disentangles explicit texture maps with fidelity and editability, leveraging semantical UV partitioning and a differentiable rasterizer. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms prior works in terms of image quality, geometry accuracy and content diversity. We also showcase the applicability of our generated avatars for animation and editing, as well as the scalability of our approach for content-style free adaptation.

FreeZe: Training-free zero-shot 6D pose estimation with geometric and vision foundation models

Estimating the 6D pose of objects unseen during training is highly desirable yet challenging. Zero-shot object 6D pose estimation methods address this challenge by leveraging additional task-specific supervision provided by large-scale, photo-realistic synthetic datasets. However, their performance heavily depends on the quality and diversity of rendered data and they require extensive training. In this work, we show how to tackle the same task but without training on specific data. We propose FreeZe, a novel solution that harnesses the capabilities of pre-trained geometric and vision foundation models. FreeZe leverages 3D geometric descriptors learned from unrelated 3D point clouds and 2D visual features learned from web-scale 2D images to generate discriminative 3D point-level descriptors. We then estimate the 6D pose of unseen objects by 3D registration based on RANSAC. We also introduce a novel algorithm to solve ambiguous cases due to geometrically symmetric objects that is based on visual features. We comprehensively evaluate FreeZe across the seven core datasets of the BOP Benchmark, which include over a hundred 3D objects and 20,000 images captured in various scenarios. FreeZe consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches, including competitors extensively trained on synthetic 6D pose estimation data. Code will be publicly available at https://andreacaraffa.github.io/freeze.

High-Fidelity Virtual Try-on with Large-Scale Unpaired Learning

Virtual try-on (VTON) transfers a target clothing image to a reference person, where clothing fidelity is a key requirement for downstream e-commerce applications. However, existing VTON methods still fall short in high-fidelity try-on due to the conflict between the high diversity of dressing styles (\eg clothes occluded by pants or distorted by posture) and the limited paired data for training. In this work, we propose a novel framework Boosted Virtual Try-on (BVTON) to leverage the large-scale unpaired learning for high-fidelity try-on. Our key insight is that pseudo try-on pairs can be reliably constructed from vastly available fashion images. Specifically, 1) we first propose a compositional canonicalizing flow that maps on-model clothes into pseudo in-shop clothes, dubbed canonical proxy. Each clothing part (sleeves, torso) is reversely deformed into an in-shop-like shape to compositionally construct the canonical proxy. 2) Next, we design a layered mask generation module that generates accurate semantic layout by training on canonical proxy. We replace the in-shop clothes used in conventional pipelines with the derived canonical proxy to boost the training process. 3) Finally, we propose an unpaired try-on synthesizer by constructing pseudo training pairs with randomly misaligned on-model clothes, where intricate skin texture and clothes boundaries can be generated. Extensive experiments on high-resolution (1024times768) datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Notably, BVTON shows great generalizability and scalability to various dressing styles and data sources.

Free-form Generation Enhances Challenging Clothed Human Modeling

Achieving realistic animated human avatars requires accurate modeling of pose-dependent clothing deformations. Existing learning-based methods heavily rely on the Linear Blend Skinning (LBS) of minimally-clothed human models like SMPL to model deformation. However, these methods struggle to handle loose clothing, such as long dresses, where the canonicalization process becomes ill-defined when the clothing is far from the body, leading to disjointed and fragmented results. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel hybrid framework to model challenging clothed humans. Our core idea is to use dedicated strategies to model different regions, depending on whether they are close to or distant from the body. Specifically, we segment the human body into three categories: unclothed, deformed, and generated. We simply replicate unclothed regions that require no deformation. For deformed regions close to the body, we leverage LBS to handle the deformation. As for the generated regions, which correspond to loose clothing areas, we introduce a novel free-form, part-aware generator to model them, as they are less affected by movements. This free-form generation paradigm brings enhanced flexibility and expressiveness to our hybrid framework, enabling it to capture the intricate geometric details of challenging loose clothing, such as skirts and dresses. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset featuring loose clothing demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior visual fidelity and realism, particularly in the most challenging cases.

Progressive Open Space Expansion for Open-Set Model Attribution

Despite the remarkable progress in generative technology, the Janus-faced issues of intellectual property protection and malicious content supervision have arisen. Efforts have been paid to manage synthetic images by attributing them to a set of potential source models. However, the closed-set classification setting limits the application in real-world scenarios for handling contents generated by arbitrary models. In this study, we focus on a challenging task, namely Open-Set Model Attribution (OSMA), to simultaneously attribute images to known models and identify those from unknown ones. Compared to existing open-set recognition (OSR) tasks focusing on semantic novelty, OSMA is more challenging as the distinction between images from known and unknown models may only lie in visually imperceptible traces. To this end, we propose a Progressive Open Space Expansion (POSE) solution, which simulates open-set samples that maintain the same semantics as closed-set samples but embedded with different imperceptible traces. Guided by a diversity constraint, the open space is simulated progressively by a set of lightweight augmentation models. We consider three real-world scenarios and construct an OSMA benchmark dataset, including unknown models trained with different random seeds, architectures, and datasets from known ones. Extensive experiments on the dataset demonstrate POSE is superior to both existing model attribution methods and off-the-shelf OSR methods.

Long-Term Photometric Consistent Novel View Synthesis with Diffusion Models

Novel view synthesis from a single input image is a challenging task, where the goal is to generate a new view of a scene from a desired camera pose that may be separated by a large motion. The highly uncertain nature of this synthesis task due to unobserved elements within the scene (i.e. occlusion) and outside the field-of-view makes the use of generative models appealing to capture the variety of possible outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel generative model capable of producing a sequence of photorealistic images consistent with a specified camera trajectory, and a single starting image. Our approach is centred on an autoregressive conditional diffusion-based model capable of interpolating visible scene elements, and extrapolating unobserved regions in a view, in a geometrically consistent manner. Conditioning is limited to an image capturing a single camera view and the (relative) pose of the new camera view. To measure the consistency over a sequence of generated views, we introduce a new metric, the thresholded symmetric epipolar distance (TSED), to measure the number of consistent frame pairs in a sequence. While previous methods have been shown to produce high quality images and consistent semantics across pairs of views, we show empirically with our metric that they are often inconsistent with the desired camera poses. In contrast, we demonstrate that our method produces both photorealistic and view-consistent imagery.

Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop

Model-based human pose estimation is currently approached through two different paradigms. Optimization-based methods fit a parametric body model to 2D observations in an iterative manner, leading to accurate image-model alignments, but are often slow and sensitive to the initialization. In contrast, regression-based methods, that use a deep network to directly estimate the model parameters from pixels, tend to provide reasonable, but not pixel accurate, results while requiring huge amounts of supervision. In this work, instead of investigating which approach is better, our key insight is that the two paradigms can form a strong collaboration. A reasonable, directly regressed estimate from the network can initialize the iterative optimization making the fitting faster and more accurate. Similarly, a pixel accurate fit from iterative optimization can act as strong supervision for the network. This is the core of our proposed approach SPIN (SMPL oPtimization IN the loop). The deep network initializes an iterative optimization routine that fits the body model to 2D joints within the training loop, and the fitted estimate is subsequently used to supervise the network. Our approach is self-improving by nature, since better network estimates can lead the optimization to better solutions, while more accurate optimization fits provide better supervision for the network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in different settings, where 3D ground truth is scarce, or not available, and we consistently outperform the state-of-the-art model-based pose estimation approaches by significant margins. The project website with videos, results, and code can be found at https://seas.upenn.edu/~nkolot/projects/spin.

UniAnimate: Taming Unified Video Diffusion Models for Consistent Human Image Animation

Recent diffusion-based human image animation techniques have demonstrated impressive success in synthesizing videos that faithfully follow a given reference identity and a sequence of desired movement poses. Despite this, there are still two limitations: i) an extra reference model is required to align the identity image with the main video branch, which significantly increases the optimization burden and model parameters; ii) the generated video is usually short in time (e.g., 24 frames), hampering practical applications. To address these shortcomings, we present a UniAnimate framework to enable efficient and long-term human video generation. First, to reduce the optimization difficulty and ensure temporal coherence, we map the reference image along with the posture guidance and noise video into a common feature space by incorporating a unified video diffusion model. Second, we propose a unified noise input that supports random noised input as well as first frame conditioned input, which enhances the ability to generate long-term video. Finally, to further efficiently handle long sequences, we explore an alternative temporal modeling architecture based on state space model to replace the original computation-consuming temporal Transformer. Extensive experimental results indicate that UniAnimate achieves superior synthesis results over existing state-of-the-art counterparts in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Notably, UniAnimate can even generate highly consistent one-minute videos by iteratively employing the first frame conditioning strategy. Code and models will be publicly available. Project page: https://unianimate.github.io/.

SelfPose3d: Self-Supervised Multi-Person Multi-View 3d Pose Estimation

We present a new self-supervised approach, SelfPose3d, for estimating 3d poses of multiple persons from multiple camera views. Unlike current state-of-the-art fully-supervised methods, our approach does not require any 2d or 3d ground-truth poses and uses only the multi-view input images from a calibrated camera setup and 2d pseudo poses generated from an off-the-shelf 2d human pose estimator. We propose two self-supervised learning objectives: self-supervised person localization in 3d space and self-supervised 3d pose estimation. We achieve self-supervised 3d person localization by training the model on synthetically generated 3d points, serving as 3d person root positions, and on the projected root-heatmaps in all the views. We then model the 3d poses of all the localized persons with a bottleneck representation, map them onto all views obtaining 2d joints, and render them using 2d Gaussian heatmaps in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Afterwards, we use the corresponding 2d joints and heatmaps from the pseudo 2d poses for learning. To alleviate the intrinsic inaccuracy of the pseudo labels, we propose an adaptive supervision attention mechanism to guide the self-supervision. Our experiments and analysis on three public benchmark datasets, including Panoptic, Shelf, and Campus, show the effectiveness of our approach, which is comparable to fully-supervised methods. Code: https://github.com/CAMMA-public/SelfPose3D. Video demo: https://youtu.be/GAqhmUIr2E8.

ICON: Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals

Current methods for learning realistic and animatable 3D clothed avatars need either posed 3D scans or 2D images with carefully controlled user poses. In contrast, our goal is to learn an avatar from only 2D images of people in unconstrained poses. Given a set of images, our method estimates a detailed 3D surface from each image and then combines these into an animatable avatar. Implicit functions are well suited to the first task, as they can capture details like hair and clothes. Current methods, however, are not robust to varied human poses and often produce 3D surfaces with broken or disembodied limbs, missing details, or non-human shapes. The problem is that these methods use global feature encoders that are sensitive to global pose. To address this, we propose ICON ("Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals"), which, instead, uses local features. ICON has two main modules, both of which exploit the SMPL(-X) body model. First, ICON infers detailed clothed-human normals (front/back) conditioned on the SMPL(-X) normals. Second, a visibility-aware implicit surface regressor produces an iso-surface of a human occupancy field. Importantly, at inference time, a feedback loop alternates between refining the SMPL(-X) mesh using the inferred clothed normals and then refining the normals. Given multiple reconstructed frames of a subject in varied poses, we use SCANimate to produce an animatable avatar from them. Evaluation on the AGORA and CAPE datasets shows that ICON outperforms the state of the art in reconstruction, even with heavily limited training data. Additionally, it is much more robust to out-of-distribution samples, e.g., in-the-wild poses/images and out-of-frame cropping. ICON takes a step towards robust 3D clothed human reconstruction from in-the-wild images. This enables creating avatars directly from video with personalized and natural pose-dependent cloth deformation.

VaLID: Variable-Length Input Diffusion for Novel View Synthesis

Novel View Synthesis (NVS), which tries to produce a realistic image at the target view given source view images and their corresponding poses, is a fundamental problem in 3D Vision. As this task is heavily under-constrained, some recent work, like Zero123, tries to solve this problem with generative modeling, specifically using pre-trained diffusion models. Although this strategy generalizes well to new scenes, compared to neural radiance field-based methods, it offers low levels of flexibility. For example, it can only accept a single-view image as input, despite realistic applications often offering multiple input images. This is because the source-view images and corresponding poses are processed separately and injected into the model at different stages. Thus it is not trivial to generalize the model into multi-view source images, once they are available. To solve this issue, we try to process each pose image pair separately and then fuse them as a unified visual representation which will be injected into the model to guide image synthesis at the target-views. However, inconsistency and computation costs increase as the number of input source-view images increases. To solve these issues, the Multi-view Cross Former module is proposed which maps variable-length input data to fix-size output data. A two-stage training strategy is introduced to further improve the efficiency during training time. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation over multiple datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method against previous approaches. The code will be released according to the acceptance.

TADA! Text to Animatable Digital Avatars

We introduce TADA, a simple-yet-effective approach that takes textual descriptions and produces expressive 3D avatars with high-quality geometry and lifelike textures, that can be animated and rendered with traditional graphics pipelines. Existing text-based character generation methods are limited in terms of geometry and texture quality, and cannot be realistically animated due to inconsistent alignment between the geometry and the texture, particularly in the face region. To overcome these limitations, TADA leverages the synergy of a 2D diffusion model and an animatable parametric body model. Specifically, we derive an optimizable high-resolution body model from SMPL-X with 3D displacements and a texture map, and use hierarchical rendering with score distillation sampling (SDS) to create high-quality, detailed, holistic 3D avatars from text. To ensure alignment between the geometry and texture, we render normals and RGB images of the generated character and exploit their latent embeddings in the SDS training process. We further introduce various expression parameters to deform the generated character during training, ensuring that the semantics of our generated character remain consistent with the original SMPL-X model, resulting in an animatable character. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that TADA significantly surpasses existing approaches on both qualitative and quantitative measures. TADA enables creation of large-scale digital character assets that are ready for animation and rendering, while also being easily editable through natural language. The code will be public for research purposes.

DreamFace: Progressive Generation of Animatable 3D Faces under Text Guidance

Emerging Metaverse applications demand accessible, accurate, and easy-to-use tools for 3D digital human creations in order to depict different cultures and societies as if in the physical world. Recent large-scale vision-language advances pave the way to for novices to conveniently customize 3D content. However, the generated CG-friendly assets still cannot represent the desired facial traits for human characteristics. In this paper, we present DreamFace, a progressive scheme to generate personalized 3D faces under text guidance. It enables layman users to naturally customize 3D facial assets that are compatible with CG pipelines, with desired shapes, textures, and fine-grained animation capabilities. From a text input to describe the facial traits, we first introduce a coarse-to-fine scheme to generate the neutral facial geometry with a unified topology. We employ a selection strategy in the CLIP embedding space, and subsequently optimize both the details displacements and normals using Score Distillation Sampling from generic Latent Diffusion Model. Then, for neutral appearance generation, we introduce a dual-path mechanism, which combines the generic LDM with a novel texture LDM to ensure both the diversity and textural specification in the UV space. We also employ a two-stage optimization to perform SDS in both the latent and image spaces to significantly provides compact priors for fine-grained synthesis. Our generated neutral assets naturally support blendshapes-based facial animations. We further improve the animation ability with personalized deformation characteristics by learning the universal expression prior using the cross-identity hypernetwork. Notably, DreamFace can generate of realistic 3D facial assets with physically-based rendering quality and rich animation ability from video footage, even for fashion icons or exotic characters in cartoons and fiction movies.

Generative Zoo

The model-based estimation of 3D animal pose and shape from images enables computational modeling of animal behavior. Training models for this purpose requires large amounts of labeled image data with precise pose and shape annotations. However, capturing such data requires the use of multi-view or marker-based motion-capture systems, which are impractical to adapt to wild animals in situ and impossible to scale across a comprehensive set of animal species. Some have attempted to address the challenge of procuring training data by pseudo-labeling individual real-world images through manual 2D annotation, followed by 3D-parameter optimization to those labels. While this approach may produce silhouette-aligned samples, the obtained pose and shape parameters are often implausible due to the ill-posed nature of the monocular fitting problem. Sidestepping real-world ambiguity, others have designed complex synthetic-data-generation pipelines leveraging video-game engines and collections of artist-designed 3D assets. Such engines yield perfect ground-truth annotations but are often lacking in visual realism and require considerable manual effort to adapt to new species or environments. Motivated by these shortcomings, we propose an alternative approach to synthetic-data generation: rendering with a conditional image-generation model. We introduce a pipeline that samples a diverse set of poses and shapes for a variety of mammalian quadrupeds and generates realistic images with corresponding ground-truth pose and shape parameters. To demonstrate the scalability of our approach, we introduce GenZoo, a synthetic dataset containing one million images of distinct subjects. We train a 3D pose and shape regressor on GenZoo, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on a real-world animal pose and shape estimation benchmark, despite being trained solely on synthetic data. https://genzoo.is.tue.mpg.de

FreeMan: Towards Benchmarking 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild

Estimating the 3D structure of the human body from natural scenes is a fundamental aspect of visual perception. This task carries great importance for fields like AIGC and human-robot interaction. In practice, 3D human pose estimation in real-world settings is a critical initial step in solving this problem. However, the current datasets, often collected under controlled laboratory conditions using complex motion capture equipment and unvarying backgrounds, are insufficient. The absence of real-world datasets is stalling the progress of this crucial task. To facilitate the development of 3D pose estimation, we present FreeMan, the first large-scale, real-world multi-view dataset. FreeMan was captured by synchronizing 8 smartphones across diverse scenarios. It comprises 11M frames from 8000 sequences, viewed from different perspectives. These sequences cover 40 subjects across 10 different scenarios, each with varying lighting conditions. We have also established an automated, precise labeling pipeline that allows for large-scale processing efficiently. We provide comprehensive evaluation baselines for a range of tasks, underlining the significant challenges posed by FreeMan. Further evaluations of standard indoor/outdoor human sensing datasets reveal that FreeMan offers robust representation transferability in real and complex scenes. FreeMan is now publicly available at https://wangjiongw.github.io/freeman.

CHORUS: Learning Canonicalized 3D Human-Object Spatial Relations from Unbounded Synthesized Images

We present a method for teaching machines to understand and model the underlying spatial common sense of diverse human-object interactions in 3D in a self-supervised way. This is a challenging task, as there exist specific manifolds of the interactions that can be considered human-like and natural, but the human pose and the geometry of objects can vary even for similar interactions. Such diversity makes the annotating task of 3D interactions difficult and hard to scale, which limits the potential to reason about that in a supervised way. One way of learning the 3D spatial relationship between humans and objects during interaction is by showing multiple 2D images captured from different viewpoints when humans interact with the same type of objects. The core idea of our method is to leverage a generative model that produces high-quality 2D images from an arbitrary text prompt input as an "unbounded" data generator with effective controllability and view diversity. Despite its imperfection of the image quality over real images, we demonstrate that the synthesized images are sufficient to learn the 3D human-object spatial relations. We present multiple strategies to leverage the synthesized images, including (1) the first method to leverage a generative image model for 3D human-object spatial relation learning; (2) a framework to reason about the 3D spatial relations from inconsistent 2D cues in a self-supervised manner via 3D occupancy reasoning with pose canonicalization; (3) semantic clustering to disambiguate different types of interactions with the same object types; and (4) a novel metric to assess the quality of 3D spatial learning of interaction.

Action Reimagined: Text-to-Pose Video Editing for Dynamic Human Actions

We introduce a novel text-to-pose video editing method, ReimaginedAct. While existing video editing tasks are limited to changes in attributes, backgrounds, and styles, our method aims to predict open-ended human action changes in video. Moreover, our method can accept not only direct instructional text prompts but also `what if' questions to predict possible action changes. ReimaginedAct comprises video understanding, reasoning, and editing modules. First, an LLM is utilized initially to obtain a plausible answer for the instruction or question, which is then used for (1) prompting Grounded-SAM to produce bounding boxes of relevant individuals and (2) retrieving a set of pose videos that we have collected for editing human actions. The retrieved pose videos and the detected individuals are then utilized to alter the poses extracted from the original video. We also employ a timestep blending module to ensure the edited video retains its original content except where necessary modifications are needed. To facilitate research in text-to-pose video editing, we introduce a new evaluation dataset, WhatifVideo-1.0. This dataset includes videos of different scenarios spanning a range of difficulty levels, along with questions and text prompts. Experimental results demonstrate that existing video editing methods struggle with human action editing, while our approach can achieve effective action editing and even imaginary editing from counterfactual questions.

Open-Universe Indoor Scene Generation using LLM Program Synthesis and Uncurated Object Databases

We present a system for generating indoor scenes in response to text prompts. The prompts are not limited to a fixed vocabulary of scene descriptions, and the objects in generated scenes are not restricted to a fixed set of object categories -- we call this setting indoor scene generation. Unlike most prior work on indoor scene generation, our system does not require a large training dataset of existing 3D scenes. Instead, it leverages the world knowledge encoded in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to synthesize programs in a domain-specific layout language that describe objects and spatial relations between them. Executing such a program produces a specification of a constraint satisfaction problem, which the system solves using a gradient-based optimization scheme to produce object positions and orientations. To produce object geometry, the system retrieves 3D meshes from a database. Unlike prior work which uses databases of category-annotated, mutually-aligned meshes, we develop a pipeline using vision-language models (VLMs) to retrieve meshes from massive databases of un-annotated, inconsistently-aligned meshes. Experimental evaluations show that our system outperforms generative models trained on 3D data for traditional, closed-universe scene generation tasks; it also outperforms a recent LLM-based layout generation method on open-universe scene generation.

DreamDance: Animating Human Images by Enriching 3D Geometry Cues from 2D Poses

In this work, we present DreamDance, a novel method for animating human images using only skeleton pose sequences as conditional inputs. Existing approaches struggle with generating coherent, high-quality content in an efficient and user-friendly manner. Concretely, baseline methods relying on only 2D pose guidance lack the cues of 3D information, leading to suboptimal results, while methods using 3D representation as guidance achieve higher quality but involve a cumbersome and time-intensive process. To address these limitations, DreamDance enriches 3D geometry cues from 2D poses by introducing an efficient diffusion model, enabling high-quality human image animation with various guidance. Our key insight is that human images naturally exhibit multiple levels of correlation, progressing from coarse skeleton poses to fine-grained geometry cues, and further from these geometry cues to explicit appearance details. Capturing such correlations could enrich the guidance signals, facilitating intra-frame coherency and inter-frame consistency. Specifically, we construct the TikTok-Dance5K dataset, comprising 5K high-quality dance videos with detailed frame annotations, including human pose, depth, and normal maps. Next, we introduce a Mutually Aligned Geometry Diffusion Model to generate fine-grained depth and normal maps for enriched guidance. Finally, a Cross-domain Controller incorporates multi-level guidance to animate human images effectively with a video diffusion model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in animating human images.

LU-NeRF: Scene and Pose Estimation by Synchronizing Local Unposed NeRFs

A critical obstacle preventing NeRF models from being deployed broadly in the wild is their reliance on accurate camera poses. Consequently, there is growing interest in extending NeRF models to jointly optimize camera poses and scene representation, which offers an alternative to off-the-shelf SfM pipelines which have well-understood failure modes. Existing approaches for unposed NeRF operate under limited assumptions, such as a prior pose distribution or coarse pose initialization, making them less effective in a general setting. In this work, we propose a novel approach, LU-NeRF, that jointly estimates camera poses and neural radiance fields with relaxed assumptions on pose configuration. Our approach operates in a local-to-global manner, where we first optimize over local subsets of the data, dubbed mini-scenes. LU-NeRF estimates local pose and geometry for this challenging few-shot task. The mini-scene poses are brought into a global reference frame through a robust pose synchronization step, where a final global optimization of pose and scene can be performed. We show our LU-NeRF pipeline outperforms prior attempts at unposed NeRF without making restrictive assumptions on the pose prior. This allows us to operate in the general SE(3) pose setting, unlike the baselines. Our results also indicate our model can be complementary to feature-based SfM pipelines as it compares favorably to COLMAP on low-texture and low-resolution images.

Source-Free and Image-Only Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Category Level Object Pose Estimation

We consider the problem of source-free unsupervised category-level pose estimation from only RGB images to a target domain without any access to source domain data or 3D annotations during adaptation. Collecting and annotating real-world 3D data and corresponding images is laborious, expensive, yet unavoidable process, since even 3D pose domain adaptation methods require 3D data in the target domain. We introduce 3DUDA, a method capable of adapting to a nuisance-ridden target domain without 3D or depth data. Our key insight stems from the observation that specific object subparts remain stable across out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios, enabling strategic utilization of these invariant subcomponents for effective model updates. We represent object categories as simple cuboid meshes, and harness a generative model of neural feature activations modeled at each mesh vertex learnt using differential rendering. We focus on individual locally robust mesh vertex features and iteratively update them based on their proximity to corresponding features in the target domain even when the global pose is not correct. Our model is then trained in an EM fashion, alternating between updating the vertex features and the feature extractor. We show that our method simulates fine-tuning on a global pseudo-labeled dataset under mild assumptions, which converges to the target domain asymptotically. Through extensive empirical validation, including a complex extreme UDA setup which combines real nuisances, synthetic noise, and occlusion, we demonstrate the potency of our simple approach in addressing the domain shift challenge and significantly improving pose estimation accuracy.

Weakly-supervised 3D Pose Transfer with Keypoints

The main challenges of 3D pose transfer are: 1) Lack of paired training data with different characters performing the same pose; 2) Disentangling pose and shape information from the target mesh; 3) Difficulty in applying to meshes with different topologies. We thus propose a novel weakly-supervised keypoint-based framework to overcome these difficulties. Specifically, we use a topology-agnostic keypoint detector with inverse kinematics to compute transformations between the source and target meshes. Our method only requires supervision on the keypoints, can be applied to meshes with different topologies and is shape-invariant for the target which allows extraction of pose-only information from the target meshes without transferring shape information. We further design a cycle reconstruction to perform self-supervised pose transfer without the need for ground truth deformed mesh with the same pose and shape as the target and source, respectively. We evaluate our approach on benchmark human and animal datasets, where we achieve superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches and even comparable performance with the fully supervised approaches. We test on the more challenging Mixamo dataset to verify our approach's ability in handling meshes with different topologies and complex clothes. Cross-dataset evaluation further shows the strong generalization ability of our approach.

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.

Drag View: Generalizable Novel View Synthesis with Unposed Imagery

We introduce DragView, a novel and interactive framework for generating novel views of unseen scenes. DragView initializes the new view from a single source image, and the rendering is supported by a sparse set of unposed multi-view images, all seamlessly executed within a single feed-forward pass. Our approach begins with users dragging a source view through a local relative coordinate system. Pixel-aligned features are obtained by projecting the sampled 3D points along the target ray onto the source view. We then incorporate a view-dependent modulation layer to effectively handle occlusion during the projection. Additionally, we broaden the epipolar attention mechanism to encompass all source pixels, facilitating the aggregation of initialized coordinate-aligned point features from other unposed views. Finally, we employ another transformer to decode ray features into final pixel intensities. Crucially, our framework does not rely on either 2D prior models or the explicit estimation of camera poses. During testing, DragView showcases the capability to generalize to new scenes unseen during training, also utilizing only unposed support images, enabling the generation of photo-realistic new views characterized by flexible camera trajectories. In our experiments, we conduct a comprehensive comparison of the performance of DragView with recent scene representation networks operating under pose-free conditions, as well as with generalizable NeRFs subject to noisy test camera poses. DragView consistently demonstrates its superior performance in view synthesis quality, while also being more user-friendly. Project page: https://zhiwenfan.github.io/DragView/.

ChatPose: Chatting about 3D Human Pose

We introduce ChatPose, a framework employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand and reason about 3D human poses from images or textual descriptions. Our work is motivated by the human ability to intuitively understand postures from a single image or a brief description, a process that intertwines image interpretation, world knowledge, and an understanding of body language. Traditional human pose estimation and generation methods often operate in isolation, lacking semantic understanding and reasoning abilities. ChatPose addresses these limitations by embedding SMPL poses as distinct signal tokens within a multimodal LLM, enabling the direct generation of 3D body poses from both textual and visual inputs. Leveraging the powerful capabilities of multimodal LLMs, ChatPose unifies classical 3D human pose and generation tasks while offering user interactions. Additionally, ChatPose empowers LLMs to apply their extensive world knowledge in reasoning about human poses, leading to two advanced tasks: speculative pose generation and reasoning about pose estimation. These tasks involve reasoning about humans to generate 3D poses from subtle text queries, possibly accompanied by images. We establish benchmarks for these tasks, moving beyond traditional 3D pose generation and estimation methods. Our results show that ChatPose outperforms existing multimodal LLMs and task-specific methods on these newly proposed tasks. Furthermore, ChatPose's ability to understand and generate 3D human poses based on complex reasoning opens new directions in human pose analysis.

PuzzleAvatar: Assembling 3D Avatars from Personal Albums

Generating personalized 3D avatars is crucial for AR/VR. However, recent text-to-3D methods that generate avatars for celebrities or fictional characters, struggle with everyday people. Methods for faithful reconstruction typically require full-body images in controlled settings. What if a user could just upload their personal "OOTD" (Outfit Of The Day) photo collection and get a faithful avatar in return? The challenge is that such casual photo collections contain diverse poses, challenging viewpoints, cropped views, and occlusion (albeit with a consistent outfit, accessories and hairstyle). We address this novel "Album2Human" task by developing PuzzleAvatar, a novel model that generates a faithful 3D avatar (in a canonical pose) from a personal OOTD album, while bypassing the challenging estimation of body and camera pose. To this end, we fine-tune a foundational vision-language model (VLM) on such photos, encoding the appearance, identity, garments, hairstyles, and accessories of a person into (separate) learned tokens and instilling these cues into the VLM. In effect, we exploit the learned tokens as "puzzle pieces" from which we assemble a faithful, personalized 3D avatar. Importantly, we can customize avatars by simply inter-changing tokens. As a benchmark for this new task, we collect a new dataset, called PuzzleIOI, with 41 subjects in a total of nearly 1K OOTD configurations, in challenging partial photos with paired ground-truth 3D bodies. Evaluation shows that PuzzleAvatar not only has high reconstruction accuracy, outperforming TeCH and MVDreamBooth, but also a unique scalability to album photos, and strong robustness. Our model and data will be public.

HyperReenact: One-Shot Reenactment via Jointly Learning to Refine and Retarget Faces

In this paper, we present our method for neural face reenactment, called HyperReenact, that aims to generate realistic talking head images of a source identity, driven by a target facial pose. Existing state-of-the-art face reenactment methods train controllable generative models that learn to synthesize realistic facial images, yet producing reenacted faces that are prone to significant visual artifacts, especially under the challenging condition of extreme head pose changes, or requiring expensive few-shot fine-tuning to better preserve the source identity characteristics. We propose to address these limitations by leveraging the photorealistic generation ability and the disentangled properties of a pretrained StyleGAN2 generator, by first inverting the real images into its latent space and then using a hypernetwork to perform: (i) refinement of the source identity characteristics and (ii) facial pose re-targeting, eliminating this way the dependence on external editing methods that typically produce artifacts. Our method operates under the one-shot setting (i.e., using a single source frame) and allows for cross-subject reenactment, without requiring any subject-specific fine-tuning. We compare our method both quantitatively and qualitatively against several state-of-the-art techniques on the standard benchmarks of VoxCeleb1 and VoxCeleb2, demonstrating the superiority of our approach in producing artifact-free images, exhibiting remarkable robustness even under extreme head pose changes. We make the code and the pretrained models publicly available at: https://github.com/StelaBou/HyperReenact .

POPE: 6-DoF Promptable Pose Estimation of Any Object, in Any Scene, with One Reference

Despite the significant progress in six degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) object pose estimation, existing methods have limited applicability in real-world scenarios involving embodied agents and downstream 3D vision tasks. These limitations mainly come from the necessity of 3D models, closed-category detection, and a large number of densely annotated support views. To mitigate this issue, we propose a general paradigm for object pose estimation, called Promptable Object Pose Estimation (POPE). The proposed approach POPE enables zero-shot 6DoF object pose estimation for any target object in any scene, while only a single reference is adopted as the support view. To achieve this, POPE leverages the power of the pre-trained large-scale 2D foundation model, employs a framework with hierarchical feature representation and 3D geometry principles. Moreover, it estimates the relative camera pose between object prompts and the target object in new views, enabling both two-view and multi-view 6DoF pose estimation tasks. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that POPE exhibits unrivaled robust performance in zero-shot settings, by achieving a significant reduction in the averaged Median Pose Error by 52.38% and 50.47% on the LINEMOD and OnePose datasets, respectively. We also conduct more challenging testings in causally captured images (see Figure 1), which further demonstrates the robustness of POPE. Project page can be found with https://paulpanwang.github.io/POPE/.

SEEAvatar: Photorealistic Text-to-3D Avatar Generation with Constrained Geometry and Appearance

Powered by large-scale text-to-image generation models, text-to-3D avatar generation has made promising progress. However, most methods fail to produce photorealistic results, limited by imprecise geometry and low-quality appearance. Towards more practical avatar generation, we present SEEAvatar, a method for generating photorealistic 3D avatars from text with SElf-Evolving constraints for decoupled geometry and appearance. For geometry, we propose to constrain the optimized avatar in a decent global shape with a template avatar. The template avatar is initialized with human prior and can be updated by the optimized avatar periodically as an evolving template, which enables more flexible shape generation. Besides, the geometry is also constrained by the static human prior in local parts like face and hands to maintain the delicate structures. For appearance generation, we use diffusion model enhanced by prompt engineering to guide a physically based rendering pipeline to generate realistic textures. The lightness constraint is applied on the albedo texture to suppress incorrect lighting effect. Experiments show that our method outperforms previous methods on both global and local geometry and appearance quality by a large margin. Since our method can produce high-quality meshes and textures, such assets can be directly applied in classic graphics pipeline for realistic rendering under any lighting condition. Project page at: https://seeavatar3d.github.io.

InterFusion: Text-Driven Generation of 3D Human-Object Interaction

In this study, we tackle the complex task of generating 3D human-object interactions (HOI) from textual descriptions in a zero-shot text-to-3D manner. We identify and address two key challenges: the unsatisfactory outcomes of direct text-to-3D methods in HOI, largely due to the lack of paired text-interaction data, and the inherent difficulties in simultaneously generating multiple concepts with complex spatial relationships. To effectively address these issues, we present InterFusion, a two-stage framework specifically designed for HOI generation. InterFusion involves human pose estimations derived from text as geometric priors, which simplifies the text-to-3D conversion process and introduces additional constraints for accurate object generation. At the first stage, InterFusion extracts 3D human poses from a synthesized image dataset depicting a wide range of interactions, subsequently mapping these poses to interaction descriptions. The second stage of InterFusion capitalizes on the latest developments in text-to-3D generation, enabling the production of realistic and high-quality 3D HOI scenes. This is achieved through a local-global optimization process, where the generation of human body and object is optimized separately, and jointly refined with a global optimization of the entire scene, ensuring a seamless and contextually coherent integration. Our experimental results affirm that InterFusion significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in 3D HOI generation.

HumanVid: Demystifying Training Data for Camera-controllable Human Image Animation

Human image animation involves generating videos from a character photo, allowing user control and unlocking potential for video and movie production. While recent approaches yield impressive results using high-quality training data, the inaccessibility of these datasets hampers fair and transparent benchmarking. Moreover, these approaches prioritize 2D human motion and overlook the significance of camera motions in videos, leading to limited control and unstable video generation.To demystify the training data, we present HumanVid, the first large-scale high-quality dataset tailored for human image animation, which combines crafted real-world and synthetic data. For the real-world data, we compile a vast collection of copyright-free real-world videos from the internet. Through a carefully designed rule-based filtering strategy, we ensure the inclusion of high-quality videos, resulting in a collection of 20K human-centric videos in 1080P resolution. Human and camera motion annotation is accomplished using a 2D pose estimator and a SLAM-based method. For the synthetic data, we gather 2,300 copyright-free 3D avatar assets to augment existing available 3D assets. Notably, we introduce a rule-based camera trajectory generation method, enabling the synthetic pipeline to incorporate diverse and precise camera motion annotation, which can rarely be found in real-world data. To verify the effectiveness of HumanVid, we establish a baseline model named CamAnimate, short for Camera-controllable Human Animation, that considers both human and camera motions as conditions. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that such simple baseline training on our HumanVid achieves state-of-the-art performance in controlling both human pose and camera motions, setting a new benchmark. Code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/zhenzhiwang/HumanVid/.

FoundPose: Unseen Object Pose Estimation with Foundation Features

We propose FoundPose, a model-based method for 6D pose estimation of unseen objects from a single RGB image. The method can quickly onboard new objects using their 3D models without requiring any object- or task-specific training. In contrast, existing methods typically pre-train on large-scale, task-specific datasets in order to generalize to new objects and to bridge the image-to-model domain gap. We demonstrate that such generalization capabilities can be observed in a recent vision foundation model trained in a self-supervised manner. Specifically, our method estimates the object pose from image-to-model 2D-3D correspondences, which are established by matching patch descriptors from the recent DINOv2 model between the image and pre-rendered object templates. We find that reliable correspondences can be established by kNN matching of patch descriptors from an intermediate DINOv2 layer. Such descriptors carry stronger positional information than descriptors from the last layer, and we show their importance when semantic information is ambiguous due to object symmetries or a lack of texture. To avoid establishing correspondences against all object templates, we develop an efficient template retrieval approach that integrates the patch descriptors into the bag-of-words representation and can promptly propose a handful of similarly looking templates. Additionally, we apply featuremetric alignment to compensate for discrepancies in the 2D-3D correspondences caused by coarse patch sampling. The resulting method noticeably outperforms existing RGB methods for refinement-free pose estimation on the standard BOP benchmark with seven diverse datasets and can be seamlessly combined with an existing render-and-compare refinement method to achieve RGB-only state-of-the-art results. Project page: evinpinar.github.io/foundpose.

GLA-GCN: Global-local Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation from Monocular Video

3D human pose estimation has been researched for decades with promising fruits. 3D human pose lifting is one of the promising research directions toward the task where both estimated pose and ground truth pose data are used for training. Existing pose lifting works mainly focus on improving the performance of estimated pose, but they usually underperform when testing on the ground truth pose data. We observe that the performance of the estimated pose can be easily improved by preparing good quality 2D pose, such as fine-tuning the 2D pose or using advanced 2D pose detectors. As such, we concentrate on improving the 3D human pose lifting via ground truth data for the future improvement of more quality estimated pose data. Towards this goal, a simple yet effective model called Global-local Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network (GLA-GCN) is proposed in this work. Our GLA-GCN globally models the spatiotemporal structure via a graph representation and backtraces local joint features for 3D human pose estimation via individually connected layers. To validate our model design, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets: Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, and MPI-INF-3DHP. Experimental results show that our GLA-GCN implemented with ground truth 2D poses significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods (e.g., up to around 3%, 17%, and 14% error reductions on Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, and MPI-INF-3DHP, respectively). GitHub: https://github.com/bruceyo/GLA-GCN.