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Mar 11

ECNet: Effective Controllable Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

The conditional text-to-image diffusion models have garnered significant attention in recent years. However, the precision of these models is often compromised mainly for two reasons, ambiguous condition input and inadequate condition guidance over single denoising loss. To address the challenges, we introduce two innovative solutions. Firstly, we propose a Spatial Guidance Injector (SGI) which enhances conditional detail by encoding text inputs with precise annotation information. This method directly tackles the issue of ambiguous control inputs by providing clear, annotated guidance to the model. Secondly, to overcome the issue of limited conditional supervision, we introduce Diffusion Consistency Loss (DCL), which applies supervision on the denoised latent code at any given time step. This encourages consistency between the latent code at each time step and the input signal, thereby enhancing the robustness and accuracy of the output. The combination of SGI and DCL results in our Effective Controllable Network (ECNet), which offers a more accurate controllable end-to-end text-to-image generation framework with a more precise conditioning input and stronger controllable supervision. We validate our approach through extensive experiments on generation under various conditions, such as human body skeletons, facial landmarks, and sketches of general objects. The results consistently demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the controllability and robustness of the generated images, outperforming existing state-of-the-art controllable text-to-image models.

GUESS:GradUally Enriching SyntheSis for Text-Driven Human Motion Generation

In this paper, we propose a novel cascaded diffusion-based generative framework for text-driven human motion synthesis, which exploits a strategy named GradUally Enriching SyntheSis (GUESS as its abbreviation). The strategy sets up generation objectives by grouping body joints of detailed skeletons in close semantic proximity together and then replacing each of such joint group with a single body-part node. Such an operation recursively abstracts a human pose to coarser and coarser skeletons at multiple granularity levels. With gradually increasing the abstraction level, human motion becomes more and more concise and stable, significantly benefiting the cross-modal motion synthesis task. The whole text-driven human motion synthesis problem is then divided into multiple abstraction levels and solved with a multi-stage generation framework with a cascaded latent diffusion model: an initial generator first generates the coarsest human motion guess from a given text description; then, a series of successive generators gradually enrich the motion details based on the textual description and the previous synthesized results. Notably, we further integrate GUESS with the proposed dynamic multi-condition fusion mechanism to dynamically balance the cooperative effects of the given textual condition and synthesized coarse motion prompt in different generation stages. Extensive experiments on large-scale datasets verify that GUESS outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by large margins in terms of accuracy, realisticness, and diversity. Code is available at https://github.com/Xuehao-Gao/GUESS.

VividPose: Advancing Stable Video Diffusion for Realistic Human Image Animation

Human image animation involves generating a video from a static image by following a specified pose sequence. Current approaches typically adopt a multi-stage pipeline that separately learns appearance and motion, which often leads to appearance degradation and temporal inconsistencies. To address these issues, we propose VividPose, an innovative end-to-end pipeline based on Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) that ensures superior temporal stability. To enhance the retention of human identity, we propose an identity-aware appearance controller that integrates additional facial information without compromising other appearance details such as clothing texture and background. This approach ensures that the generated videos maintain high fidelity to the identity of human subject, preserving key facial features across various poses. To accommodate diverse human body shapes and hand movements, we introduce a geometry-aware pose controller that utilizes both dense rendering maps from SMPL-X and sparse skeleton maps. This enables accurate alignment of pose and shape in the generated videos, providing a robust framework capable of handling a wide range of body shapes and dynamic hand movements. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on the UBCFashion and TikTok benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, VividPose exhibits superior generalization capabilities on our proposed in-the-wild dataset. Codes and models will be available.

HyperHuman: Hyper-Realistic Human Generation with Latent Structural Diffusion

Despite significant advances in large-scale text-to-image models, achieving hyper-realistic human image generation remains a desirable yet unsolved task. Existing models like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2 tend to generate human images with incoherent parts or unnatural poses. To tackle these challenges, our key insight is that human image is inherently structural over multiple granularities, from the coarse-level body skeleton to fine-grained spatial geometry. Therefore, capturing such correlations between the explicit appearance and latent structure in one model is essential to generate coherent and natural human images. To this end, we propose a unified framework, HyperHuman, that generates in-the-wild human images of high realism and diverse layouts. Specifically, 1) we first build a large-scale human-centric dataset, named HumanVerse, which consists of 340M images with comprehensive annotations like human pose, depth, and surface normal. 2) Next, we propose a Latent Structural Diffusion Model that simultaneously denoises the depth and surface normal along with the synthesized RGB image. Our model enforces the joint learning of image appearance, spatial relationship, and geometry in a unified network, where each branch in the model complements to each other with both structural awareness and textural richness. 3) Finally, to further boost the visual quality, we propose a Structure-Guided Refiner to compose the predicted conditions for more detailed generation of higher resolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework yields the state-of-the-art performance, generating hyper-realistic human images under diverse scenarios. Project Page: https://snap-research.github.io/HyperHuman/

A skeletonization algorithm for gradient-based optimization

The skeleton of a digital image is a compact representation of its topology, geometry, and scale. It has utility in many computer vision applications, such as image description, segmentation, and registration. However, skeletonization has only seen limited use in contemporary deep learning solutions. Most existing skeletonization algorithms are not differentiable, making it impossible to integrate them with gradient-based optimization. Compatible algorithms based on morphological operations and neural networks have been proposed, but their results often deviate from the geometry and topology of the true medial axis. This work introduces the first three-dimensional skeletonization algorithm that is both compatible with gradient-based optimization and preserves an object's topology. Our method is exclusively based on matrix additions and multiplications, convolutional operations, basic non-linear functions, and sampling from a uniform probability distribution, allowing it to be easily implemented in any major deep learning library. In benchmarking experiments, we prove the advantages of our skeletonization algorithm compared to non-differentiable, morphological, and neural-network-based baselines. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our algorithm by integrating it with two medical image processing applications that use gradient-based optimization: deep-learning-based blood vessel segmentation, and multimodal registration of the mandible in computed tomography and magnetic resonance images.

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.

Cross-Domain Complementary Learning Using Pose for Multi-Person Part Segmentation

Supervised deep learning with pixel-wise training labels has great successes on multi-person part segmentation. However, data labeling at pixel-level is very expensive. To solve the problem, people have been exploring to use synthetic data to avoid the data labeling. Although it is easy to generate labels for synthetic data, the results are much worse compared to those using real data and manual labeling. The degradation of the performance is mainly due to the domain gap, i.e., the discrepancy of the pixel value statistics between real and synthetic data. In this paper, we observe that real and synthetic humans both have a skeleton (pose) representation. We found that the skeletons can effectively bridge the synthetic and real domains during the training. Our proposed approach takes advantage of the rich and realistic variations of the real data and the easily obtainable labels of the synthetic data to learn multi-person part segmentation on real images without any human-annotated labels. Through experiments, we show that without any human labeling, our method performs comparably to several state-of-the-art approaches which require human labeling on Pascal-Person-Parts and COCO-DensePose datasets. On the other hand, if part labels are also available in the real-images during training, our method outperforms the supervised state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. We further demonstrate the generalizability of our method on predicting novel keypoints in real images where no real data labels are available for the novel keypoints detection. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/kevinlin311tw/CDCL-human-part-segmentation

Refinement Module based on Parse Graph of Feature Map for Human Pose Estimation

Parse graphs of the human body can be obtained in the human brain to help humans complete the human pose estimation (HPE). It contains a hierarchical structure, like a tree structure, and context relations among nodes. Many researchers pre-design the parse graph of body structure, and then design framework for HPE. However, these frameworks are difficulty adapting when encountering situations that differ from the preset human structure. Different from them, we regard the feature map as a whole, similarly to human body, so the feature map can be optimized based on parse graphs and each node feature is learned implicitly instead of explicitly, which means it can flexibly respond to different human body structure. In this paper, we design the Refinement Module based on the Parse Graph of feature map (RMPG), which includes two stages: top-down decomposition and bottom-up combination. In the top-down decomposition stage, the feature map is decomposed into multiple sub-feature maps along the channel and their context relations are calculated to obtain their respective context information. In the bottom-up combination stage, the sub-feature maps and their context information are combined to obtain refined sub-feature maps, and then these refined sub-feature maps are concatenated to obtain the refined feature map. Additionally ,we design a top-down framework by using multiple RMPG modules for HPE, some of which are supervised to obtain context relations among body parts. Our framework achieves excellent results on the COCO keypoint detection, CrowdPose and MPII human pose datasets. More importantly, our experiments also demonstrate the effectiveness of RMPG on different methods, including SimpleBaselines, Hourglass, and ViTPose.

Detailed 3D Human Body Reconstruction from Multi-view Images Combining Voxel Super-Resolution and Learned Implicit Representation

The task of reconstructing detailed 3D human body models from images is interesting but challenging in computer vision due to the high freedom of human bodies. In order to tackle the problem, we propose a coarse-to-fine method to reconstruct a detailed 3D human body from multi-view images combining voxel super-resolution based on learning the implicit representation. Firstly, the coarse 3D models are estimated by learning an implicit representation based on multi-scale features which are extracted by multi-stage hourglass networks from the multi-view images. Then, taking the low resolution voxel grids which are generated by the coarse 3D models as input, the voxel super-resolution based on an implicit representation is learned through a multi-stage 3D convolutional neural network. Finally, the refined detailed 3D human body models can be produced by the voxel super-resolution which can preserve the details and reduce the false reconstruction of the coarse 3D models. Benefiting from the implicit representation, the training process in our method is memory efficient and the detailed 3D human body produced by our method from multi-view images is the continuous decision boundary with high-resolution geometry. In addition, the coarse-to-fine method based on voxel super-resolution can remove false reconstructions and preserve the appearance details in the final reconstruction, simultaneously. In the experiments, our method quantitatively and qualitatively achieves the competitive 3D human body reconstructions from images with various poses and shapes on both the real and synthetic datasets.

Multi-HMR: Multi-Person Whole-Body Human Mesh Recovery in a Single Shot

We present Multi-HMR, a strong sigle-shot model for multi-person 3D human mesh recovery from a single RGB image. Predictions encompass the whole body, i.e., including hands and facial expressions, using the SMPL-X parametric model and 3D location in the camera coordinate system. Our model detects people by predicting coarse 2D heatmaps of person locations, using features produced by a standard Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone. It then predicts their whole-body pose, shape and 3D location using a new cross-attention module called the Human Prediction Head (HPH), with one query attending to the entire set of features for each detected person. As direct prediction of fine-grained hands and facial poses in a single shot, i.e., without relying on explicit crops around body parts, is hard to learn from existing data, we introduce CUFFS, the Close-Up Frames of Full-Body Subjects dataset, containing humans close to the camera with diverse hand poses. We show that incorporating it into the training data further enhances predictions, particularly for hands. Multi-HMR also optionally accounts for camera intrinsics, if available, by encoding camera ray directions for each image token. This simple design achieves strong performance on whole-body and body-only benchmarks simultaneously: a ViT-S backbone on 448{times}448 images already yields a fast and competitive model, while larger models and higher resolutions obtain state-of-the-art results.

BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion

We show, for the first time, that neural networks trained only on synthetic data achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the problem of 3D human pose and shape (HPS) estimation from real images. Previous synthetic datasets have been small, unrealistic, or lacked realistic clothing. Achieving sufficient realism is non-trivial and we show how to do this for full bodies in motion. Specifically, our BEDLAM dataset contains monocular RGB videos with ground-truth 3D bodies in SMPL-X format. It includes a diversity of body shapes, motions, skin tones, hair, and clothing. The clothing is realistically simulated on the moving bodies using commercial clothing physics simulation. We render varying numbers of people in realistic scenes with varied lighting and camera motions. We then train various HPS regressors using BEDLAM and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on real-image benchmarks despite training with synthetic data. We use BEDLAM to gain insights into what model design choices are important for accuracy. With good synthetic training data, we find that a basic method like HMR approaches the accuracy of the current SOTA method (CLIFF). BEDLAM is useful for a variety of tasks and all images, ground truth bodies, 3D clothing, support code, and more are available for research purposes. Additionally, we provide detailed information about our synthetic data generation pipeline, enabling others to generate their own datasets. See the project page: https://bedlam.is.tue.mpg.de/.

Point2SSM: Learning Morphological Variations of Anatomies from Point Cloud

We present Point2SSM, a novel unsupervised learning approach for constructing correspondence-based statistical shape models (SSMs) directly from raw point clouds. SSM is crucial in clinical research, enabling population-level analysis of morphological variation in bones and organs. Traditional methods of SSM construction have limitations, including the requirement of noise-free surface meshes or binary volumes, reliance on assumptions or templates, and prolonged inference times due to simultaneous optimization of the entire cohort. Point2SSM overcomes these barriers by providing a data-driven solution that infers SSMs directly from raw point clouds, reducing inference burdens and increasing applicability as point clouds are more easily acquired. While deep learning on 3D point clouds has seen success in unsupervised representation learning and shape correspondence, its application to anatomical SSM construction is largely unexplored. We conduct a benchmark of state-of-the-art point cloud deep networks on the SSM task, revealing their limited robustness to clinical challenges such as noisy, sparse, or incomplete input and limited training data. Point2SSM addresses these issues through an attention-based module, providing effective correspondence mappings from learned point features. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing networks in terms of accurate surface sampling and correspondence, better capturing population-level statistics.

Detailed Annotations of Chest X-Rays via CT Projection for Report Understanding

In clinical radiology reports, doctors capture important information about the patient's health status. They convey their observations from raw medical imaging data about the inner structures of a patient. As such, formulating reports requires medical experts to possess wide-ranging knowledge about anatomical regions with their normal, healthy appearance as well as the ability to recognize abnormalities. This explicit grasp on both the patient's anatomy and their appearance is missing in current medical image-processing systems as annotations are especially difficult to gather. This renders the models to be narrow experts e.g. for identifying specific diseases. In this work, we recover this missing link by adding human anatomy into the mix and enable the association of content in medical reports to their occurrence in associated imagery (medical phrase grounding). To exploit anatomical structures in this scenario, we present a sophisticated automatic pipeline to gather and integrate human bodily structures from computed tomography datasets, which we incorporate in our PAXRay: A Projected dataset for the segmentation of Anatomical structures in X-Ray data. Our evaluation shows that methods that take advantage of anatomical information benefit heavily in visually grounding radiologists' findings, as our anatomical segmentations allow for up to absolute 50% better grounding results on the OpenI dataset as compared to commonly used region proposals. The PAXRay dataset is available at https://constantinseibold.github.io/paxray/.

Ensemble One-dimensional Convolution Neural Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition

In this paper, we proposed a effective but extensible residual one-dimensional convolution neural network as base network, based on the this network, we proposed four subnets to explore the features of skeleton sequences from each aspect. Given a skeleton sequences, the spatial information are encoded into the skeleton joints coordinate in a frame and the temporal information are present by multiple frames. Limited by the skeleton sequence representations, two-dimensional convolution neural network cannot be used directly, we chose one-dimensional convolution layer as the basic layer. Each sub network could extract discriminative features from different aspects. Our first subnet is a two-stream network which could explore both temporal and spatial information. The second is a body-parted network, which could gain micro spatial features and macro temporal features. The third one is an attention network, the main contribution of which is to focus the key frames and feature channels which high related with the action classes in a skeleton sequence. One frame-difference network, as the last subnet, mainly processes the joints changes between the consecutive frames. Four subnets ensemble together by late fusion, the key problem of ensemble method is each subnet should have a certain performance and between the subnets, there are diversity existing. Each subnet shares a wellperformance basenet and differences between subnets guaranteed the diversity. Experimental results show that the ensemble network gets a state-of-the-art performance on three widely used datasets.

MagicArticulate: Make Your 3D Models Articulation-Ready

With the explosive growth of 3D content creation, there is an increasing demand for automatically converting static 3D models into articulation-ready versions that support realistic animation. Traditional approaches rely heavily on manual annotation, which is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, the lack of large-scale benchmarks has hindered the development of learning-based solutions. In this work, we present MagicArticulate, an effective framework that automatically transforms static 3D models into articulation-ready assets. Our key contributions are threefold. First, we introduce Articulation-XL, a large-scale benchmark containing over 33k 3D models with high-quality articulation annotations, carefully curated from Objaverse-XL. Second, we propose a novel skeleton generation method that formulates the task as a sequence modeling problem, leveraging an auto-regressive transformer to naturally handle varying numbers of bones or joints within skeletons and their inherent dependencies across different 3D models. Third, we predict skinning weights using a functional diffusion process that incorporates volumetric geodesic distance priors between vertices and joints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MagicArticulate significantly outperforms existing methods across diverse object categories, achieving high-quality articulation that enables realistic animation. Project page: https://chaoyuesong.github.io/MagicArticulate.

UltraPose: Synthesizing Dense Pose with 1 Billion Points by Human-body Decoupling 3D Model

Recovering dense human poses from images plays a critical role in establishing an image-to-surface correspondence between RGB images and the 3D surface of the human body, serving the foundation of rich real-world applications, such as virtual humans, monocular-to-3d reconstruction. However, the popular DensePose-COCO dataset relies on a sophisticated manual annotation system, leading to severe limitations in acquiring the denser and more accurate annotated pose resources. In this work, we introduce a new 3D human-body model with a series of decoupled parameters that could freely control the generation of the body. Furthermore, we build a data generation system based on this decoupling 3D model, and construct an ultra dense synthetic benchmark UltraPose, containing around 1.3 billion corresponding points. Compared to the existing manually annotated DensePose-COCO dataset, the synthetic UltraPose has ultra dense image-to-surface correspondences without annotation cost and error. Our proposed UltraPose provides the largest benchmark and data resources for lifting the model capability in predicting more accurate dense poses. To promote future researches in this field, we also propose a transformer-based method to model the dense correspondence between 2D and 3D worlds. The proposed model trained on synthetic UltraPose can be applied to real-world scenarios, indicating the effectiveness of our benchmark and model.

Learning 3D Human Shape and Pose from Dense Body Parts

Reconstructing 3D human shape and pose from monocular images is challenging despite the promising results achieved by the most recent learning-based methods. The commonly occurred misalignment comes from the facts that the mapping from images to the model space is highly non-linear and the rotation-based pose representation of body models is prone to result in the drift of joint positions. In this work, we investigate learning 3D human shape and pose from dense correspondences of body parts and propose a Decompose-and-aggregate Network (DaNet) to address these issues. DaNet adopts the dense correspondence maps, which densely build a bridge between 2D pixels and 3D vertices, as intermediate representations to facilitate the learning of 2D-to-3D mapping. The prediction modules of DaNet are decomposed into one global stream and multiple local streams to enable global and fine-grained perceptions for the shape and pose predictions, respectively. Messages from local streams are further aggregated to enhance the robust prediction of the rotation-based poses, where a position-aided rotation feature refinement strategy is proposed to exploit spatial relationships between body joints. Moreover, a Part-based Dropout (PartDrop) strategy is introduced to drop out dense information from intermediate representations during training, encouraging the network to focus on more complementary body parts as well as neighboring position features. The efficacy of the proposed method is validated on both indoor and real-world datasets including Human3.6M, UP3D, COCO, and 3DPW, showing that our method could significantly improve the reconstruction performance in comparison with previous state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://hongwenzhang.github.io/dense2mesh .

SkeletonMAE: Graph-based Masked Autoencoder for Skeleton Sequence Pre-training

Skeleton sequence representation learning has shown great advantages for action recognition due to its promising ability to model human joints and topology. However, the current methods usually require sufficient labeled data for training computationally expensive models, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Moreover, these methods ignore how to utilize the fine-grained dependencies among different skeleton joints to pre-train an efficient skeleton sequence learning model that can generalize well across different datasets. In this paper, we propose an efficient skeleton sequence learning framework, named Skeleton Sequence Learning (SSL). To comprehensively capture the human pose and obtain discriminative skeleton sequence representation, we build an asymmetric graph-based encoder-decoder pre-training architecture named SkeletonMAE, which embeds skeleton joint sequence into Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and reconstructs the masked skeleton joints and edges based on the prior human topology knowledge. Then, the pre-trained SkeletonMAE encoder is integrated with the Spatial-Temporal Representation Learning (STRL) module to build the SSL framework. Extensive experimental results show that our SSL generalizes well across different datasets and outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition methods on FineGym, Diving48, NTU 60 and NTU 120 datasets. Additionally, we obtain comparable performance to some fully supervised methods. The code is avaliable at https://github.com/HongYan1123/SkeletonMAE.

Zolly: Zoom Focal Length Correctly for Perspective-Distorted Human Mesh Reconstruction

As it is hard to calibrate single-view RGB images in the wild, existing 3D human mesh reconstruction (3DHMR) methods either use a constant large focal length or estimate one based on the background environment context, which can not tackle the problem of the torso, limb, hand or face distortion caused by perspective camera projection when the camera is close to the human body. The naive focal length assumptions can harm this task with the incorrectly formulated projection matrices. To solve this, we propose Zolly, the first 3DHMR method focusing on perspective-distorted images. Our approach begins with analysing the reason for perspective distortion, which we find is mainly caused by the relative location of the human body to the camera center. We propose a new camera model and a novel 2D representation, termed distortion image, which describes the 2D dense distortion scale of the human body. We then estimate the distance from distortion scale features rather than environment context features. Afterwards, we integrate the distortion feature with image features to reconstruct the body mesh. To formulate the correct projection matrix and locate the human body position, we simultaneously use perspective and weak-perspective projection loss. Since existing datasets could not handle this task, we propose the first synthetic dataset PDHuman and extend two real-world datasets tailored for this task, all containing perspective-distorted human images. Extensive experiments show that Zolly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on both perspective-distorted datasets and the standard benchmark (3DPW).

HACK: Learning a Parametric Head and Neck Model for High-fidelity Animation

Significant advancements have been made in developing parametric models for digital humans, with various approaches concentrating on parts such as the human body, hand, or face. Nevertheless, connectors such as the neck have been overlooked in these models, with rich anatomical priors often unutilized. In this paper, we introduce HACK (Head-And-neCK), a novel parametric model for constructing the head and cervical region of digital humans. Our model seeks to disentangle the full spectrum of neck and larynx motions, facial expressions, and appearance variations, providing personalized and anatomically consistent controls, particularly for the neck regions. To build our HACK model, we acquire a comprehensive multi-modal dataset of the head and neck under various facial expressions. We employ a 3D ultrasound imaging scheme to extract the inner biomechanical structures, namely the precise 3D rotation information of the seven vertebrae of the cervical spine. We then adopt a multi-view photometric approach to capture the geometry and physically-based textures of diverse subjects, who exhibit a diverse range of static expressions as well as sequential head-and-neck movements. Using the multi-modal dataset, we train the parametric HACK model by separating the 3D head and neck depiction into various shape, pose, expression, and larynx blendshapes from the neutral expression and the rest skeletal pose. We adopt an anatomically-consistent skeletal design for the cervical region, and the expression is linked to facial action units for artist-friendly controls. HACK addresses the head and neck as a unified entity, offering more accurate and expressive controls, with a new level of realism, particularly for the neck regions. This approach has significant benefits for numerous applications and enables inter-correlation analysis between head and neck for fine-grained motion synthesis and transfer.

PSHuman: Photorealistic Single-view Human Reconstruction using Cross-Scale Diffusion

Detailed and photorealistic 3D human modeling is essential for various applications and has seen tremendous progress. However, full-body reconstruction from a monocular RGB image remains challenging due to the ill-posed nature of the problem and sophisticated clothing topology with self-occlusions. In this paper, we propose PSHuman, a novel framework that explicitly reconstructs human meshes utilizing priors from the multiview diffusion model. It is found that directly applying multiview diffusion on single-view human images leads to severe geometric distortions, especially on generated faces. To address it, we propose a cross-scale diffusion that models the joint probability distribution of global full-body shape and local facial characteristics, enabling detailed and identity-preserved novel-view generation without any geometric distortion. Moreover, to enhance cross-view body shape consistency of varied human poses, we condition the generative model on parametric models like SMPL-X, which provide body priors and prevent unnatural views inconsistent with human anatomy. Leveraging the generated multi-view normal and color images, we present SMPLX-initialized explicit human carving to recover realistic textured human meshes efficiently. Extensive experimental results and quantitative evaluations on CAPE and THuman2.1 datasets demonstrate PSHumans superiority in geometry details, texture fidelity, and generalization capability.

Generative Action Description Prompts for Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition has recently received considerable attention. Current approaches to skeleton-based action recognition are typically formulated as one-hot classification tasks and do not fully exploit the semantic relations between actions. For example, "make victory sign" and "thumb up" are two actions of hand gestures, whose major difference lies in the movement of hands. This information is agnostic from the categorical one-hot encoding of action classes but could be unveiled from the action description. Therefore, utilizing action description in training could potentially benefit representation learning. In this work, we propose a Generative Action-description Prompts (GAP) approach for skeleton-based action recognition. More specifically, we employ a pre-trained large-scale language model as the knowledge engine to automatically generate text descriptions for body parts movements of actions, and propose a multi-modal training scheme by utilizing the text encoder to generate feature vectors for different body parts and supervise the skeleton encoder for action representation learning. Experiments show that our proposed GAP method achieves noticeable improvements over various baseline models without extra computation cost at inference. GAP achieves new state-of-the-arts on popular skeleton-based action recognition benchmarks, including NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120 and NW-UCLA. The source code is available at https://github.com/MartinXM/GAP.

HumanRefiner: Benchmarking Abnormal Human Generation and Refining with Coarse-to-fine Pose-Reversible Guidance

Text-to-image diffusion models have significantly advanced in conditional image generation. However, these models usually struggle with accurately rendering images featuring humans, resulting in distorted limbs and other anomalies. This issue primarily stems from the insufficient recognition and evaluation of limb qualities in diffusion models. To address this issue, we introduce AbHuman, the first large-scale synthesized human benchmark focusing on anatomical anomalies. This benchmark consists of 56K synthesized human images, each annotated with detailed, bounding-box level labels identifying 147K human anomalies in 18 different categories. Based on this, the recognition of human anomalies can be established, which in turn enhances image generation through traditional techniques such as negative prompting and guidance. To further boost the improvement, we propose HumanRefiner, a novel plug-and-play approach for the coarse-to-fine refinement of human anomalies in text-to-image generation. Specifically, HumanRefiner utilizes a self-diagnostic procedure to detect and correct issues related to both coarse-grained abnormal human poses and fine-grained anomaly levels, facilitating pose-reversible diffusion generation. Experimental results on the AbHuman benchmark demonstrate that HumanRefiner significantly reduces generative discrepancies, achieving a 2.9x improvement in limb quality compared to the state-of-the-art open-source generator SDXL and a 1.4x improvement over DALL-E 3 in human evaluations. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Enderfga/HumanRefiner.

TotalSegmentator: robust segmentation of 104 anatomical structures in CT images

We present a deep learning segmentation model that can automatically and robustly segment all major anatomical structures in body CT images. In this retrospective study, 1204 CT examinations (from the years 2012, 2016, and 2020) were used to segment 104 anatomical structures (27 organs, 59 bones, 10 muscles, 8 vessels) relevant for use cases such as organ volumetry, disease characterization, and surgical or radiotherapy planning. The CT images were randomly sampled from routine clinical studies and thus represent a real-world dataset (different ages, pathologies, scanners, body parts, sequences, and sites). The authors trained an nnU-Net segmentation algorithm on this dataset and calculated Dice similarity coefficients (Dice) to evaluate the model's performance. The trained algorithm was applied to a second dataset of 4004 whole-body CT examinations to investigate age dependent volume and attenuation changes. The proposed model showed a high Dice score (0.943) on the test set, which included a wide range of clinical data with major pathologies. The model significantly outperformed another publicly available segmentation model on a separate dataset (Dice score, 0.932 versus 0.871, respectively). The aging study demonstrated significant correlations between age and volume and mean attenuation for a variety of organ groups (e.g., age and aortic volume; age and mean attenuation of the autochthonous dorsal musculature). The developed model enables robust and accurate segmentation of 104 anatomical structures. The annotated dataset (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6802613) and toolkit (https://www.github.com/wasserth/TotalSegmentator) are publicly available.

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.

RTMW: Real-Time Multi-Person 2D and 3D Whole-body Pose Estimation

Whole-body pose estimation is a challenging task that requires simultaneous prediction of keypoints for the body, hands, face, and feet. Whole-body pose estimation aims to predict fine-grained pose information for the human body, including the face, torso, hands, and feet, which plays an important role in the study of human-centric perception and generation and in various applications. In this work, we present RTMW (Real-Time Multi-person Whole-body pose estimation models), a series of high-performance models for 2D/3D whole-body pose estimation. We incorporate RTMPose model architecture with FPN and HEM (Hierarchical Encoding Module) to better capture pose information from different body parts with various scales. The model is trained with a rich collection of open-source human keypoint datasets with manually aligned annotations and further enhanced via a two-stage distillation strategy. RTMW demonstrates strong performance on multiple whole-body pose estimation benchmarks while maintaining high inference efficiency and deployment friendliness. We release three sizes: m/l/x, with RTMW-l achieving a 70.2 mAP on the COCO-Wholebody benchmark, making it the first open-source model to exceed 70 mAP on this benchmark. Meanwhile, we explored the performance of RTMW in the task of 3D whole-body pose estimation, conducting image-based monocular 3D whole-body pose estimation in a coordinate classification manner. We hope this work can benefit both academic research and industrial applications. The code and models have been made publicly available at: https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmpose/tree/main/projects/rtmpose

Towards Automation of Human Stage of Decay Identification: An Artificial Intelligence Approach

Determining the stage of decomposition (SOD) is crucial for estimating the postmortem interval and identifying human remains. Currently, labor-intensive manual scoring methods are used for this purpose, but they are subjective and do not scale for the emerging large-scale archival collections of human decomposition photos. This study explores the feasibility of automating two common human decomposition scoring methods proposed by Megyesi and Gelderman using artificial intelligence (AI). We evaluated two popular deep learning models, Inception V3 and Xception, by training them on a large dataset of human decomposition images to classify the SOD for different anatomical regions, including the head, torso, and limbs. Additionally, an interrater study was conducted to assess the reliability of the AI models compared to human forensic examiners for SOD identification. The Xception model achieved the best classification performance, with macro-averaged F1 scores of .878, .881, and .702 for the head, torso, and limbs when predicting Megyesi's SODs, and .872, .875, and .76 for the head, torso, and limbs when predicting Gelderman's SODs. The interrater study results supported AI's ability to determine the SOD at a reliability level comparable to a human expert. This work demonstrates the potential of AI models trained on a large dataset of human decomposition images to automate SOD identification.

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.

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.

Physics-based Motion Retargeting from Sparse Inputs

Avatars are important to create interactive and immersive experiences in virtual worlds. One challenge in animating these characters to mimic a user's motion is that commercial AR/VR products consist only of a headset and controllers, providing very limited sensor data of the user's pose. Another challenge is that an avatar might have a different skeleton structure than a human and the mapping between them is unclear. In this work we address both of these challenges. We introduce a method to retarget motions in real-time from sparse human sensor data to characters of various morphologies. Our method uses reinforcement learning to train a policy to control characters in a physics simulator. We only require human motion capture data for training, without relying on artist-generated animations for each avatar. This allows us to use large motion capture datasets to train general policies that can track unseen users from real and sparse data in real-time. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on three characters with different skeleton structure: a dinosaur, a mouse-like creature and a human. We show that the avatar poses often match the user surprisingly well, despite having no sensor information of the lower body available. We discuss and ablate the important components in our framework, specifically the kinematic retargeting step, the imitation, contact and action reward as well as our asymmetric actor-critic observations. We further explore the robustness of our method in a variety of settings including unbalancing, dancing and sports motions.

MedShapeNet -- A Large-Scale Dataset of 3D Medical Shapes for Computer Vision

Prior to the deep learning era, shape was commonly used to describe the objects. Nowadays, state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms in medical imaging are predominantly diverging from computer vision, where voxel grids, meshes, point clouds, and implicit surface models are used. This is seen from numerous shape-related publications in premier vision conferences as well as the growing popularity of ShapeNet (about 51,300 models) and Princeton ModelNet (127,915 models). For the medical domain, we present a large collection of anatomical shapes (e.g., bones, organs, vessels) and 3D models of surgical instrument, called MedShapeNet, created to facilitate the translation of data-driven vision algorithms to medical applications and to adapt SOTA vision algorithms to medical problems. As a unique feature, we directly model the majority of shapes on the imaging data of real patients. As of today, MedShapeNet includes 23 dataset with more than 100,000 shapes that are paired with annotations (ground truth). Our data is freely accessible via a web interface and a Python application programming interface (API) and can be used for discriminative, reconstructive, and variational benchmarks as well as various applications in virtual, augmented, or mixed reality, and 3D printing. Exemplary, we present use cases in the fields of classification of brain tumors, facial and skull reconstructions, multi-class anatomy completion, education, and 3D printing. In future, we will extend the data and improve the interfaces. The project pages are: https://medshapenet.ikim.nrw/ and https://github.com/Jianningli/medshapenet-feedback

Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Survey

Estimating human pose and shape from monocular images is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Since the release of statistical body models, 3D human mesh recovery has been drawing broader attention. With the same goal of obtaining well-aligned and physically plausible mesh results, two paradigms have been developed to overcome challenges in the 2D-to-3D lifting process: i) an optimization-based paradigm, where different data terms and regularization terms are exploited as optimization objectives; and ii) a regression-based paradigm, where deep learning techniques are embraced to solve the problem in an end-to-end fashion. Meanwhile, continuous efforts are devoted to improving the quality of 3D mesh labels for a wide range of datasets. Though remarkable progress has been achieved in the past decade, the task is still challenging due to flexible body motions, diverse appearances, complex environments, and insufficient in-the-wild annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey to focus on the task of monocular 3D human mesh recovery. We start with the introduction of body models and then elaborate recovery frameworks and training objectives by providing in-depth analyses of their strengths and weaknesses. We also summarize datasets, evaluation metrics, and benchmark results. Open issues and future directions are discussed in the end, hoping to motivate researchers and facilitate their research in this area. A regularly updated project page can be found at https://github.com/tinatiansjz/hmr-survey.

NCHO: Unsupervised Learning for Neural 3D Composition of Humans and Objects

Deep generative models have been recently extended to synthesizing 3D digital humans. However, previous approaches treat clothed humans as a single chunk of geometry without considering the compositionality of clothing and accessories. As a result, individual items cannot be naturally composed into novel identities, leading to limited expressiveness and controllability of generative 3D avatars. While several methods attempt to address this by leveraging synthetic data, the interaction between humans and objects is not authentic due to the domain gap, and manual asset creation is difficult to scale for a wide variety of objects. In this work, we present a novel framework for learning a compositional generative model of humans and objects (backpacks, coats, scarves, and more) from real-world 3D scans. Our compositional model is interaction-aware, meaning the spatial relationship between humans and objects, and the mutual shape change by physical contact is fully incorporated. The key challenge is that, since humans and objects are in contact, their 3D scans are merged into a single piece. To decompose them without manual annotations, we propose to leverage two sets of 3D scans of a single person with and without objects. Our approach learns to decompose objects and naturally compose them back into a generative human model in an unsupervised manner. Despite our simple setup requiring only the capture of a single subject with objects, our experiments demonstrate the strong generalization of our model by enabling the natural composition of objects to diverse identities in various poses and the composition of multiple objects, which is unseen in training data. https://taeksuu.github.io/ncho/

SkateFormer: Skeletal-Temporal Transformer for Human Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition, which classifies human actions based on the coordinates of joints and their connectivity within skeleton data, is widely utilized in various scenarios. While Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been proposed for skeleton data represented as graphs, they suffer from limited receptive fields constrained by joint connectivity. To address this limitation, recent advancements have introduced transformer-based methods. However, capturing correlations between all joints in all frames requires substantial memory resources. To alleviate this, we propose a novel approach called Skeletal-Temporal Transformer (SkateFormer) that partitions joints and frames based on different types of skeletal-temporal relation (Skate-Type) and performs skeletal-temporal self-attention (Skate-MSA) within each partition. We categorize the key skeletal-temporal relations for action recognition into a total of four distinct types. These types combine (i) two skeletal relation types based on physically neighboring and distant joints, and (ii) two temporal relation types based on neighboring and distant frames. Through this partition-specific attention strategy, our SkateFormer can selectively focus on key joints and frames crucial for action recognition in an action-adaptive manner with efficient computation. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets validate that our SkateFormer outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods.

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.

Embodied Hands: Modeling and Capturing Hands and Bodies Together

Humans move their hands and bodies together to communicate and solve tasks. Capturing and replicating such coordinated activity is critical for virtual characters that behave realistically. Surprisingly, most methods treat the 3D modeling and tracking of bodies and hands separately. Here we formulate a model of hands and bodies interacting together and fit it to full-body 4D sequences. When scanning or capturing the full body in 3D, hands are small and often partially occluded, making their shape and pose hard to recover. To cope with low-resolution, occlusion, and noise, we develop a new model called MANO (hand Model with Articulated and Non-rigid defOrmations). MANO is learned from around 1000 high-resolution 3D scans of hands of 31 subjects in a wide variety of hand poses. The model is realistic, low-dimensional, captures non-rigid shape changes with pose, is compatible with standard graphics packages, and can fit any human hand. MANO provides a compact mapping from hand poses to pose blend shape corrections and a linear manifold of pose synergies. We attach MANO to a standard parameterized 3D body shape model (SMPL), resulting in a fully articulated body and hand model (SMPL+H). We illustrate SMPL+H by fitting complex, natural, activities of subjects captured with a 4D scanner. The fitting is fully automatic and results in full body models that move naturally with detailed hand motions and a realism not seen before in full body performance capture. The models and data are freely available for research purposes in our website (http://mano.is.tue.mpg.de).

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.

Joint2Human: High-quality 3D Human Generation via Compact Spherical Embedding of 3D Joints

3D human generation is increasingly significant in various applications. However, the direct use of 2D generative methods in 3D generation often results in significant loss of local details, while methods that reconstruct geometry from generated images struggle with global view consistency. In this work, we introduce Joint2Human, a novel method that leverages 2D diffusion models to generate detailed 3D human geometry directly, ensuring both global structure and local details. To achieve this, we employ the Fourier occupancy field (FOF) representation, enabling the direct production of 3D shapes as preliminary results using 2D generative models. With the proposed high-frequency enhancer and the multi-view recarving strategy, our method can seamlessly integrate the details from different views into a uniform global shape.To better utilize the 3D human prior and enhance control over the generated geometry, we introduce a compact spherical embedding of 3D joints. This allows for effective application of pose guidance during the generation process. Additionally, our method is capable of generating 3D humans guided by textual inputs. Our experimental results demonstrate the capability of our method to ensure global structure, local details, high resolution, and low computational cost, simultaneously. More results and code can be found on our project page at http://cic.tju.edu.cn/faculty/likun/projects/Joint2Human.

DNA-Rendering: A Diverse Neural Actor Repository for High-Fidelity Human-centric Rendering

Realistic human-centric rendering plays a key role in both computer vision and computer graphics. Rapid progress has been made in the algorithm aspect over the years, yet existing human-centric rendering datasets and benchmarks are rather impoverished in terms of diversity, which are crucial for rendering effect. Researchers are usually constrained to explore and evaluate a small set of rendering problems on current datasets, while real-world applications require methods to be robust across different scenarios. In this work, we present DNA-Rendering, a large-scale, high-fidelity repository of human performance data for neural actor rendering. DNA-Rendering presents several alluring attributes. First, our dataset contains over 1500 human subjects, 5000 motion sequences, and 67.5M frames' data volume. Second, we provide rich assets for each subject -- 2D/3D human body keypoints, foreground masks, SMPLX models, cloth/accessory materials, multi-view images, and videos. These assets boost the current method's accuracy on downstream rendering tasks. Third, we construct a professional multi-view system to capture data, which contains 60 synchronous cameras with max 4096 x 3000 resolution, 15 fps speed, and stern camera calibration steps, ensuring high-quality resources for task training and evaluation. Along with the dataset, we provide a large-scale and quantitative benchmark in full-scale, with multiple tasks to evaluate the existing progress of novel view synthesis, novel pose animation synthesis, and novel identity rendering methods. In this manuscript, we describe our DNA-Rendering effort as a revealing of new observations, challenges, and future directions to human-centric rendering. The dataset, code, and benchmarks will be publicly available at https://dna-rendering.github.io/

TeCH: Text-guided Reconstruction of Lifelike Clothed Humans

Despite recent research advancements in reconstructing clothed humans from a single image, accurately restoring the "unseen regions" with high-level details remains an unsolved challenge that lacks attention. Existing methods often generate overly smooth back-side surfaces with a blurry texture. But how to effectively capture all visual attributes of an individual from a single image, which are sufficient to reconstruct unseen areas (e.g., the back view)? Motivated by the power of foundation models, TeCH reconstructs the 3D human by leveraging 1) descriptive text prompts (e.g., garments, colors, hairstyles) which are automatically generated via a garment parsing model and Visual Question Answering (VQA), 2) a personalized fine-tuned Text-to-Image diffusion model (T2I) which learns the "indescribable" appearance. To represent high-resolution 3D clothed humans at an affordable cost, we propose a hybrid 3D representation based on DMTet, which consists of an explicit body shape grid and an implicit distance field. Guided by the descriptive prompts + personalized T2I diffusion model, the geometry and texture of the 3D humans are optimized through multi-view Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and reconstruction losses based on the original observation. TeCH produces high-fidelity 3D clothed humans with consistent & delicate texture, and detailed full-body geometry. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that TeCH outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy and rendering quality. The code will be publicly available for research purposes at https://huangyangyi.github.io/tech

VerSe: A Vertebrae Labelling and Segmentation Benchmark for Multi-detector CT Images

Vertebral labelling and segmentation are two fundamental tasks in an automated spine processing pipeline. Reliable and accurate processing of spine images is expected to benefit clinical decision-support systems for diagnosis, surgery planning, and population-based analysis on spine and bone health. However, designing automated algorithms for spine processing is challenging predominantly due to considerable variations in anatomy and acquisition protocols and due to a severe shortage of publicly available data. Addressing these limitations, the Large Scale Vertebrae Segmentation Challenge (VerSe) was organised in conjunction with the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) in 2019 and 2020, with a call for algorithms towards labelling and segmentation of vertebrae. Two datasets containing a total of 374 multi-detector CT scans from 355 patients were prepared and 4505 vertebrae have individually been annotated at voxel-level by a human-machine hybrid algorithm (https://osf.io/nqjyw/, https://osf.io/t98fz/). A total of 25 algorithms were benchmarked on these datasets. In this work, we present the the results of this evaluation and further investigate the performance-variation at vertebra-level, scan-level, and at different fields-of-view. We also evaluate the generalisability of the approaches to an implicit domain shift in data by evaluating the top performing algorithms of one challenge iteration on data from the other iteration. The principal takeaway from VerSe: the performance of an algorithm in labelling and segmenting a spine scan hinges on its ability to correctly identify vertebrae in cases of rare anatomical variations. The content and code concerning VerSe can be accessed at: https://github.com/anjany/verse.

Putting People in their Place: Monocular Regression of 3D People in Depth

Given an image with multiple people, our goal is to directly regress the pose and shape of all the people as well as their relative depth. Inferring the depth of a person in an image, however, is fundamentally ambiguous without knowing their height. This is particularly problematic when the scene contains people of very different sizes, e.g. from infants to adults. To solve this, we need several things. First, we develop a novel method to infer the poses and depth of multiple people in a single image. While previous work that estimates multiple people does so by reasoning in the image plane, our method, called BEV, adds an additional imaginary Bird's-Eye-View representation to explicitly reason about depth. BEV reasons simultaneously about body centers in the image and in depth and, by combing these, estimates 3D body position. Unlike prior work, BEV is a single-shot method that is end-to-end differentiable. Second, height varies with age, making it impossible to resolve depth without also estimating the age of people in the image. To do so, we exploit a 3D body model space that lets BEV infer shapes from infants to adults. Third, to train BEV, we need a new dataset. Specifically, we create a "Relative Human" (RH) dataset that includes age labels and relative depth relationships between the people in the images. Extensive experiments on RH and AGORA demonstrate the effectiveness of the model and training scheme. BEV outperforms existing methods on depth reasoning, child shape estimation, and robustness to occlusion. The code and dataset are released for research purposes.

Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance

In this study, we introduce a methodology for human image animation by leveraging a 3D human parametric model within a latent diffusion framework to enhance shape alignment and motion guidance in curernt human generative techniques. The methodology utilizes the SMPL(Skinned Multi-Person Linear) model as the 3D human parametric model to establish a unified representation of body shape and pose. This facilitates the accurate capture of intricate human geometry and motion characteristics from source videos. Specifically, we incorporate rendered depth images, normal maps, and semantic maps obtained from SMPL sequences, alongside skeleton-based motion guidance, to enrich the conditions to the latent diffusion model with comprehensive 3D shape and detailed pose attributes. A multi-layer motion fusion module, integrating self-attention mechanisms, is employed to fuse the shape and motion latent representations in the spatial domain. By representing the 3D human parametric model as the motion guidance, we can perform parametric shape alignment of the human body between the reference image and the source video motion. Experimental evaluations conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate the methodology's superior ability to generate high-quality human animations that accurately capture both pose and shape variations. Furthermore, our approach also exhibits superior generalization capabilities on the proposed wild dataset. Project page: https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/champ.

Efficient 3D Articulated Human Generation with Layered Surface Volumes

Access to high-quality and diverse 3D articulated digital human assets is crucial in various applications, ranging from virtual reality to social platforms. Generative approaches, such as 3D generative adversarial networks (GANs), are rapidly replacing laborious manual content creation tools. However, existing 3D GAN frameworks typically rely on scene representations that leverage either template meshes, which are fast but offer limited quality, or volumes, which offer high capacity but are slow to render, thereby limiting the 3D fidelity in GAN settings. In this work, we introduce layered surface volumes (LSVs) as a new 3D object representation for articulated digital humans. LSVs represent a human body using multiple textured mesh layers around a conventional template. These layers are rendered using alpha compositing with fast differentiable rasterization, and they can be interpreted as a volumetric representation that allocates its capacity to a manifold of finite thickness around the template. Unlike conventional single-layer templates that struggle with representing fine off-surface details like hair or accessories, our surface volumes naturally capture such details. LSVs can be articulated, and they exhibit exceptional efficiency in GAN settings, where a 2D generator learns to synthesize the RGBA textures for the individual layers. Trained on unstructured, single-view 2D image datasets, our LSV-GAN generates high-quality and view-consistent 3D articulated digital humans without the need for view-inconsistent 2D upsampling networks.

FinePOSE: Fine-Grained Prompt-Driven 3D Human Pose Estimation via Diffusion Models

The 3D Human Pose Estimation (3D HPE) task uses 2D images or videos to predict human joint coordinates in 3D space. Despite recent advancements in deep learning-based methods, they mostly ignore the capability of coupling accessible texts and naturally feasible knowledge of humans, missing out on valuable implicit supervision to guide the 3D HPE task. Moreover, previous efforts often study this task from the perspective of the whole human body, neglecting fine-grained guidance hidden in different body parts. To this end, we present a new Fine-Grained Prompt-Driven Denoiser based on a diffusion model for 3D HPE, named FinePOSE. It consists of three core blocks enhancing the reverse process of the diffusion model: (1) Fine-grained Part-aware Prompt learning (FPP) block constructs fine-grained part-aware prompts via coupling accessible texts and naturally feasible knowledge of body parts with learnable prompts to model implicit guidance. (2) Fine-grained Prompt-pose Communication (FPC) block establishes fine-grained communications between learned part-aware prompts and poses to improve the denoising quality. (3) Prompt-driven Timestamp Stylization (PTS) block integrates learned prompt embedding and temporal information related to the noise level to enable adaptive adjustment at each denoising step. Extensive experiments on public single-human pose estimation datasets show that FinePOSE outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We further extend FinePOSE to multi-human pose estimation. Achieving 34.3mm average MPJPE on the EgoHumans dataset demonstrates the potential of FinePOSE to deal with complex multi-human scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/FinePOSE_CVPR2024.

DOPE: Distillation Of Part Experts for whole-body 3D pose estimation in the wild

We introduce DOPE, the first method to detect and estimate whole-body 3D human poses, including bodies, hands and faces, in the wild. Achieving this level of details is key for a number of applications that require understanding the interactions of the people with each other or with the environment. The main challenge is the lack of in-the-wild data with labeled whole-body 3D poses. In previous work, training data has been annotated or generated for simpler tasks focusing on bodies, hands or faces separately. In this work, we propose to take advantage of these datasets to train independent experts for each part, namely a body, a hand and a face expert, and distill their knowledge into a single deep network designed for whole-body 2D-3D pose detection. In practice, given a training image with partial or no annotation, each part expert detects its subset of keypoints in 2D and 3D and the resulting estimations are combined to obtain whole-body pseudo ground-truth poses. A distillation loss encourages the whole-body predictions to mimic the experts' outputs. Our results show that this approach significantly outperforms the same whole-body model trained without distillation while staying close to the performance of the experts. Importantly, DOPE is computationally less demanding than the ensemble of experts and can achieve real-time performance. Test code and models are available at https://europe.naverlabs.com/research/computer-vision/dope.