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Sep 4

DisPose: Disentangling Pose Guidance for Controllable Human Image Animation

Controllable human image animation aims to generate videos from reference images using driving videos. Due to the limited control signals provided by sparse guidance (e.g., skeleton pose), recent works have attempted to introduce additional dense conditions (e.g., depth map) to ensure motion alignment. However, such strict dense guidance impairs the quality of the generated video when the body shape of the reference character differs significantly from that of the driving video. In this paper, we present DisPose to mine more generalizable and effective control signals without additional dense input, which disentangles the sparse skeleton pose in human image animation into motion field guidance and keypoint correspondence. Specifically, we generate a dense motion field from a sparse motion field and the reference image, which provides region-level dense guidance while maintaining the generalization of the sparse pose control. We also extract diffusion features corresponding to pose keypoints from the reference image, and then these point features are transferred to the target pose to provide distinct identity information. To seamlessly integrate into existing models, we propose a plug-and-play hybrid ControlNet that improves the quality and consistency of generated videos while freezing the existing model parameters. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of DisPose compared to current methods. Code: https://github.com/lihxxx/DisPose{https://github.com/lihxxx/DisPose}.

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.

HOComp: Interaction-Aware Human-Object Composition

While existing image-guided composition methods may help insert a foreground object onto a user-specified region of a background image, achieving natural blending inside the region with the rest of the image unchanged, we observe that these existing methods often struggle in synthesizing seamless interaction-aware compositions when the task involves human-object interactions. In this paper, we first propose HOComp, a novel approach for compositing a foreground object onto a human-centric background image, while ensuring harmonious interactions between the foreground object and the background person and their consistent appearances. Our approach includes two key designs: (1) MLLMs-driven Region-based Pose Guidance (MRPG), which utilizes MLLMs to identify the interaction region as well as the interaction type (e.g., holding and lefting) to provide coarse-to-fine constraints to the generated pose for the interaction while incorporating human pose landmarks to track action variations and enforcing fine-grained pose constraints; and (2) Detail-Consistent Appearance Preservation (DCAP), which unifies a shape-aware attention modulation mechanism, a multi-view appearance loss, and a background consistency loss to ensure consistent shapes/textures of the foreground and faithful reproduction of the background human. We then propose the first dataset, named Interaction-aware Human-Object Composition (IHOC), for the task. Experimental results on our dataset show that HOComp effectively generates harmonious human-object interactions with consistent appearances, and outperforms relevant methods qualitatively and quantitatively.

SViMo: Synchronized Diffusion for Video and Motion Generation in Hand-object Interaction Scenarios

Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) generation has significant application potential. However, current 3D HOI motion generation approaches heavily rely on predefined 3D object models and lab-captured motion data, limiting generalization capabilities. Meanwhile, HOI video generation methods prioritize pixel-level visual fidelity, often sacrificing physical plausibility. Recognizing that visual appearance and motion patterns share fundamental physical laws in the real world, we propose a novel framework that combines visual priors and dynamic constraints within a synchronized diffusion process to generate the HOI video and motion simultaneously. To integrate the heterogeneous semantics, appearance, and motion features, our method implements tri-modal adaptive modulation for feature aligning, coupled with 3D full-attention for modeling inter- and intra-modal dependencies. Furthermore, we introduce a vision-aware 3D interaction diffusion model that generates explicit 3D interaction sequences directly from the synchronized diffusion outputs, then feeds them back to establish a closed-loop feedback cycle. This architecture eliminates dependencies on predefined object models or explicit pose guidance while significantly enhancing video-motion consistency. Experimental results demonstrate our method's superiority over state-of-the-art approaches in generating high-fidelity, dynamically plausible HOI sequences, with notable generalization capabilities in unseen real-world scenarios. Project page at https://github.com/Droliven/SViMo\_project.

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.

Replace Anyone in Videos

The field of controllable human-centric video generation has witnessed remarkable progress, particularly with the advent of diffusion models. However, achieving precise and localized control over human motion in videos, such as replacing or inserting individuals while preserving desired motion patterns, still remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we present the ReplaceAnyone framework, which focuses on localized human replacement and insertion featuring intricate backgrounds. Specifically, we formulate this task as an image-conditioned video inpainting paradigm with pose guidance, utilizing a unified end-to-end video diffusion architecture that facilitates image-conditioned video inpainting within masked regions. To prevent shape leakage and enable granular local control, we introduce diverse mask forms involving both regular and irregular shapes. Furthermore, we implement an enriched visual guidance mechanism to enhance appearance alignment, a hybrid inpainting encoder to further preserve the detailed background information in the masked video, and a two-phase optimization methodology to simplify the training difficulty. ReplaceAnyone enables seamless replacement or insertion of characters while maintaining the desired pose motion and reference appearance within a single framework. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating realistic and coherent video content. The proposed ReplaceAnyone can be seamlessly applied not only to traditional 3D-UNet base models but also to DiT-based video models such as Wan2.1. The code will be available at https://github.com/ali-vilab/UniAnimate-DiT.

DAViD: Modeling Dynamic Affordance of 3D Objects using Pre-trained Video Diffusion Models

Understanding the ability of humans to use objects is crucial for AI to improve daily life. Existing studies for learning such ability focus on human-object patterns (e.g., contact, spatial relation, orientation) in static situations, and learning Human-Object Interaction (HOI) patterns over time (i.e., movement of human and object) is relatively less explored. In this paper, we introduce a novel type of affordance named Dynamic Affordance. For a given input 3D object mesh, we learn dynamic affordance which models the distribution of both (1) human motion and (2) human-guided object pose during interactions. As a core idea, we present a method to learn the 3D dynamic affordance from synthetically generated 2D videos, leveraging a pre-trained video diffusion model. Specifically, we propose a pipeline that first generates 2D HOI videos from the 3D object and then lifts them into 3D to generate 4D HOI samples. Once we generate diverse 4D HOI samples on various target objects, we train our DAViD, where we present a method based on the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module for pre-trained human motion diffusion model (MDM) and an object pose diffusion model with human pose guidance. Our motion diffusion model is extended for multi-object interactions, demonstrating the advantage of our pipeline with LoRA for combining the concepts of object usage. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate our DAViD outperforms the baselines in generating human motion with HOIs.

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.

RealisDance-DiT: Simple yet Strong Baseline towards Controllable Character Animation in the Wild

Controllable character animation remains a challenging problem, particularly in handling rare poses, stylized characters, character-object interactions, complex illumination, and dynamic scenes. To tackle these issues, prior work has largely focused on injecting pose and appearance guidance via elaborate bypass networks, but often struggles to generalize to open-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new perspective that, as long as the foundation model is powerful enough, straightforward model modifications with flexible fine-tuning strategies can largely address the above challenges, taking a step towards controllable character animation in the wild. Specifically, we introduce RealisDance-DiT, built upon the Wan-2.1 video foundation model. Our sufficient analysis reveals that the widely adopted Reference Net design is suboptimal for large-scale DiT models. Instead, we demonstrate that minimal modifications to the foundation model architecture yield a surprisingly strong baseline. We further propose the low-noise warmup and "large batches and small iterations" strategies to accelerate model convergence during fine-tuning while maximally preserving the priors of the foundation model. In addition, we introduce a new test dataset that captures diverse real-world challenges, complementing existing benchmarks such as TikTok dataset and UBC fashion video dataset, to comprehensively evaluate the proposed method. Extensive experiments show that RealisDance-DiT outperforms existing methods by a large margin.

Towards Real-World Aerial Vision Guidance with Categorical 6D Pose Tracker

Tracking the object 6-DoF pose is crucial for various downstream robot tasks and real-world applications. In this paper, we investigate the real-world robot task of aerial vision guidance for aerial robotics manipulation, utilizing category-level 6-DoF pose tracking. Aerial conditions inevitably introduce special challenges, such as rapid viewpoint changes in pitch and roll and inter-frame differences. To support these challenges in task, we firstly introduce a robust category-level 6-DoF pose tracker (Robust6DoF). This tracker leverages shape and temporal prior knowledge to explore optimal inter-frame keypoint pairs, generated under a priori structural adaptive supervision in a coarse-to-fine manner. Notably, our Robust6DoF employs a Spatial-Temporal Augmentation module to deal with the problems of the inter-frame differences and intra-class shape variations through both temporal dynamic filtering and shape-similarity filtering. We further present a Pose-Aware Discrete Servo strategy (PAD-Servo), serving as a decoupling approach to implement the final aerial vision guidance task. It contains two servo action policies to better accommodate the structural properties of aerial robotics manipulation. Exhaustive experiments on four well-known public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our Robust6DoF. Real-world tests directly verify that our Robust6DoF along with PAD-Servo can be readily used in real-world aerial robotic applications.

INTER: Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models by Interaction Guidance Sampling

Hallucinations in large vision-language models (LVLMs) pose significant challenges for real-world applications, as LVLMs may generate responses that appear plausible yet remain inconsistent with the associated visual content. This issue rarely occurs in human cognition. We argue that this discrepancy arises from humans' ability to effectively leverage multimodal interaction information in data samples. Specifically, humans typically first gather multimodal information, analyze the interactions across modalities for understanding, and then express their understanding through language. Motivated by this observation, we conduct extensive experiments on popular LVLMs and obtained insights that surprisingly reveal human-like, though less pronounced, cognitive behavior of LVLMs on multimodal samples. Building on these findings, we further propose INTER: Interaction Guidance Sampling, a novel training-free algorithm that mitigate hallucinations without requiring additional data. Specifically, INTER explicitly guides LVLMs to effectively reapply their understanding of multimodal interaction information when generating responses, thereby reducing potential hallucinations. On six benchmarks including VQA and image captioning tasks, INTER achieves an average improvement of up to 3.4\% on five LVLMs compared to the state-of-the-art decoding strategy. The code will be released when the paper is accepted.

FocusCLIP: Multimodal Subject-Level Guidance for Zero-Shot Transfer in Human-Centric Tasks

We propose FocusCLIP, integrating subject-level guidance--a specialized mechanism for target-specific supervision--into the CLIP framework for improved zero-shot transfer on human-centric tasks. Our novel contributions enhance CLIP on both the vision and text sides. On the vision side, we incorporate ROI heatmaps emulating human visual attention mechanisms to emphasize subject-relevant image regions. On the text side, we introduce human pose descriptions to provide rich contextual information. For human-centric tasks, FocusCLIP is trained with images from the MPII Human Pose dataset. The proposed approach surpassed CLIP by an average of 8.61% across five previously unseen datasets covering three human-centric tasks. FocusCLIP achieved an average accuracy of 33.65% compared to 25.04% by CLIP. We observed a 3.98% improvement in activity recognition, a 14.78% improvement in age classification, and a 7.06% improvement in emotion recognition. Moreover, using our proposed single-shot LLM prompting strategy, we release a high-quality MPII Pose Descriptions dataset to encourage further research in multimodal learning for human-centric tasks. Furthermore, we also demonstrate the effectiveness of our subject-level supervision on non-human-centric tasks. FocusCLIP shows a 2.47% improvement over CLIP in zero-shot bird classification using the CUB dataset. Our findings emphasize the potential of integrating subject-level guidance with general pretraining methods for enhanced downstream performance.

ASDF: Assembly State Detection Utilizing Late Fusion by Integrating 6D Pose Estimation

In medical and industrial domains, providing guidance for assembly processes can be critical to ensure efficiency and safety. Errors in assembly can lead to significant consequences such as extended surgery times and prolonged manufacturing or maintenance times in industry. Assembly scenarios can benefit from in-situ augmented reality visualization, i.e., augmentations in close proximity to the target object, to provide guidance, reduce assembly times, and minimize errors. In order to enable in-situ visualization, 6D pose estimation can be leveraged to identify the correct location for an augmentation. Existing 6D pose estimation techniques primarily focus on individual objects and static captures. However, assembly scenarios have various dynamics, including occlusion during assembly and dynamics in the appearance of assembly objects. Existing work focus either on object detection combined with state detection, or focus purely on the pose estimation. To address the challenges of 6D pose estimation in combination with assembly state detection, our approach ASDF builds upon the strengths of YOLOv8, a real-time capable object detection framework. We extend this framework, refine the object pose, and fuse pose knowledge with network-detected pose information. Utilizing our late fusion in our Pose2State module results in refined 6D pose estimation and assembly state detection. By combining both pose and state information, our Pose2State module predicts the final assembly state with precision. The evaluation of our ASDF dataset shows that our Pose2State module leads to an improved assembly state detection and that the improvement of the assembly state further leads to a more robust 6D pose estimation. Moreover, on the GBOT dataset, we outperform the pure deep learning-based network and even outperform the hybrid and pure tracking-based approaches.

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.

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.

FinePhys: Fine-grained Human Action Generation by Explicitly Incorporating Physical Laws for Effective Skeletal Guidance

Despite significant advances in video generation, synthesizing physically plausible human actions remains a persistent challenge, particularly in modeling fine-grained semantics and complex temporal dynamics. For instance, generating gymnastics routines such as "switch leap with 0.5 turn" poses substantial difficulties for current methods, often yielding unsatisfactory results. To bridge this gap, we propose FinePhys, a Fine-grained human action generation framework that incorporates Physics to obtain effective skeletal guidance. Specifically, FinePhys first estimates 2D poses in an online manner and then performs 2D-to-3D dimension lifting via in-context learning. To mitigate the instability and limited interpretability of purely data-driven 3D poses, we further introduce a physics-based motion re-estimation module governed by Euler-Lagrange equations, calculating joint accelerations via bidirectional temporal updating. The physically predicted 3D poses are then fused with data-driven ones, offering multi-scale 2D heatmap guidance for the diffusion process. Evaluated on three fine-grained action subsets from FineGym (FX-JUMP, FX-TURN, and FX-SALTO), FinePhys significantly outperforms competitive baselines. Comprehensive qualitative results further demonstrate FinePhys's ability to generate more natural and plausible fine-grained human actions.

MTVCrafter: 4D Motion Tokenization for Open-World Human Image Animation

Human image animation has gained increasing attention and developed rapidly due to its broad applications in digital humans. However, existing methods rely largely on 2D-rendered pose images for motion guidance, which limits generalization and discards essential 3D information for open-world animation. To tackle this problem, we propose MTVCrafter (Motion Tokenization Video Crafter), the first framework that directly models raw 3D motion sequences (i.e., 4D motion) for human image animation. Specifically, we introduce 4DMoT (4D motion tokenizer) to quantize 3D motion sequences into 4D motion tokens. Compared to 2D-rendered pose images, 4D motion tokens offer more robust spatio-temporal cues and avoid strict pixel-level alignment between pose image and character, enabling more flexible and disentangled control. Then, we introduce MV-DiT (Motion-aware Video DiT). By designing unique motion attention with 4D positional encodings, MV-DiT can effectively leverage motion tokens as 4D compact yet expressive context for human image animation in the complex 3D world. Hence, it marks a significant step forward in this field and opens a new direction for pose-guided human video generation. Experiments show that our MTVCrafter achieves state-of-the-art results with an FID-VID of 6.98, surpassing the second-best by 65%. Powered by robust motion tokens, MTVCrafter also generalizes well to diverse open-world characters (single/multiple, full/half-body) across various styles and scenarios. Our video demos and code are on: https://github.com/DINGYANB/MTVCrafter.

MVInpainter: Learning Multi-View Consistent Inpainting to Bridge 2D and 3D Editing

Novel View Synthesis (NVS) and 3D generation have recently achieved prominent improvements. However, these works mainly focus on confined categories or synthetic 3D assets, which are discouraged from generalizing to challenging in-the-wild scenes and fail to be employed with 2D synthesis directly. Moreover, these methods heavily depended on camera poses, limiting their real-world applications. To overcome these issues, we propose MVInpainter, re-formulating the 3D editing as a multi-view 2D inpainting task. Specifically, MVInpainter partially inpaints multi-view images with the reference guidance rather than intractably generating an entirely novel view from scratch, which largely simplifies the difficulty of in-the-wild NVS and leverages unmasked clues instead of explicit pose conditions. To ensure cross-view consistency, MVInpainter is enhanced by video priors from motion components and appearance guidance from concatenated reference key&value attention. Furthermore, MVInpainter incorporates slot attention to aggregate high-level optical flow features from unmasked regions to control the camera movement with pose-free training and inference. Sufficient scene-level experiments on both object-centric and forward-facing datasets verify the effectiveness of MVInpainter, including diverse tasks, such as multi-view object removal, synthesis, insertion, and replacement. The project page is https://ewrfcas.github.io/MVInpainter/.

DynamiCtrl: Rethinking the Basic Structure and the Role of Text for High-quality Human Image Animation

With diffusion transformer (DiT) excelling in video generation, its use in specific tasks has drawn increasing attention. However, adapting DiT for pose-guided human image animation faces two core challenges: (a) existing U-Net-based pose control methods may be suboptimal for the DiT backbone; and (b) removing text guidance, as in previous approaches, often leads to semantic loss and model degradation. To address these issues, we propose DynamiCtrl, a novel framework for human animation in video DiT architecture. Specifically, we use a shared VAE encoder for human images and driving poses, unifying them into a common latent space, maintaining pose fidelity, and eliminating the need for an expert pose encoder during video denoising. To integrate pose control into the DiT backbone effectively, we propose a novel Pose-adaptive Layer Norm model. It injects normalized pose features into the denoising process via conditioning on visual tokens, enabling seamless and scalable pose control across DiT blocks. Furthermore, to overcome the shortcomings of text removal, we introduce the "Joint-text" paradigm, which preserves the role of text embeddings to provide global semantic context. Through full-attention blocks, image and pose features are aligned with text features, enhancing semantic consistency, leveraging pretrained knowledge, and enabling multi-level control. Experiments verify the superiority of DynamiCtrl on benchmark and self-collected data (e.g., achieving the best LPIPS of 0.166), demonstrating strong character control and high-quality synthesis. The project page is available at https://gulucaptain.github.io/DynamiCtrl/.

TokenHMR: Advancing Human Mesh Recovery with a Tokenized Pose Representation

We address the problem of regressing 3D human pose and shape from a single image, with a focus on 3D accuracy. The current best methods leverage large datasets of 3D pseudo-ground-truth (p-GT) and 2D keypoints, leading to robust performance. With such methods, we observe a paradoxical decline in 3D pose accuracy with increasing 2D accuracy. This is caused by biases in the p-GT and the use of an approximate camera projection model. We quantify the error induced by current camera models and show that fitting 2D keypoints and p-GT accurately causes incorrect 3D poses. Our analysis defines the invalid distances within which minimizing 2D and p-GT losses is detrimental. We use this to formulate a new loss Threshold-Adaptive Loss Scaling (TALS) that penalizes gross 2D and p-GT losses but not smaller ones. With such a loss, there are many 3D poses that could equally explain the 2D evidence. To reduce this ambiguity we need a prior over valid human poses but such priors can introduce unwanted bias. To address this, we exploit a tokenized representation of human pose and reformulate the problem as token prediction. This restricts the estimated poses to the space of valid poses, effectively providing a uniform prior. Extensive experiments on the EMDB and 3DPW datasets show that our reformulated keypoint loss and tokenization allows us to train on in-the-wild data while improving 3D accuracy over the state-of-the-art. Our models and code are available for research at https://tokenhmr.is.tue.mpg.de.

MagicStick: Controllable Video Editing via Control Handle Transformations

Text-based video editing has recently attracted considerable interest in changing the style or replacing the objects with a similar structure. Beyond this, we demonstrate that properties such as shape, size, location, motion, etc., can also be edited in videos. Our key insight is that the keyframe transformations of the specific internal feature (e.g., edge maps of objects or human pose), can easily propagate to other frames to provide generation guidance. We thus propose MagicStick, a controllable video editing method that edits the video properties by utilizing the transformation on the extracted internal control signals. In detail, to keep the appearance, we inflate both the pretrained image diffusion model and ControlNet to the temporal dimension and train low-rank adaptions (LORA) layers to fit the specific scenes. Then, in editing, we perform an inversion and editing framework. Differently, finetuned ControlNet is introduced in both inversion and generation for attention guidance with the proposed attention remix between the spatial attention maps of inversion and editing. Yet succinct, our method is the first method to show the ability of video property editing from the pre-trained text-to-image model. We present experiments on numerous examples within our unified framework. We also compare with shape-aware text-based editing and handcrafted motion video generation, demonstrating our superior temporal consistency and editing capability than previous works. The code and models will be made publicly available.

MaGIC: Multi-modality Guided Image Completion

Vanilla image completion approaches exhibit sensitivity to large missing regions, attributed to the limited availability of reference information for plausible generation. To mitigate this, existing methods incorporate the extra cue as a guidance for image completion. Despite improvements, these approaches are often restricted to employing a single modality (e.g., segmentation or sketch maps), which lacks scalability in leveraging multi-modality for more plausible completion. In this paper, we propose a novel, simple yet effective method for Multi-modal Guided Image Completion, dubbed MaGIC, which not only supports a wide range of single modality as the guidance (e.g., text, canny edge, sketch, segmentation, depth, and pose), but also adapts to arbitrarily customized combination of these modalities (i.e., arbitrary multi-modality) for image completion. For building MaGIC, we first introduce a modality-specific conditional U-Net (MCU-Net) that injects single-modal signal into a U-Net denoiser for single-modal guided image completion. Then, we devise a consistent modality blending (CMB) method to leverage modality signals encoded in multiple learned MCU-Nets through gradient guidance in latent space. Our CMB is training-free, thereby avoids the cumbersome joint re-training of different modalities, which is the secret of MaGIC to achieve exceptional flexibility in accommodating new modalities for completion. Experiments show the superiority of MaGIC over state-of-the-art methods and its generalization to various completion tasks. Our project with code and models is available at yeates.github.io/MaGIC-Page/.

Seeing the Pose in the Pixels: Learning Pose-Aware Representations in Vision Transformers

Human perception of surroundings is often guided by the various poses present within the environment. Many computer vision tasks, such as human action recognition and robot imitation learning, rely on pose-based entities like human skeletons or robotic arms. However, conventional Vision Transformer (ViT) models uniformly process all patches, neglecting valuable pose priors in input videos. We argue that incorporating poses into RGB data is advantageous for learning fine-grained and viewpoint-agnostic representations. Consequently, we introduce two strategies for learning pose-aware representations in ViTs. The first method, called Pose-aware Attention Block (PAAB), is a plug-and-play ViT block that performs localized attention on pose regions within videos. The second method, dubbed Pose-Aware Auxiliary Task (PAAT), presents an auxiliary pose prediction task optimized jointly with the primary ViT task. Although their functionalities differ, both methods succeed in learning pose-aware representations, enhancing performance in multiple diverse downstream tasks. Our experiments, conducted across seven datasets, reveal the efficacy of both pose-aware methods on three video analysis tasks, with PAAT holding a slight edge over PAAB. Both PAAT and PAAB surpass their respective backbone Transformers by up to 9.8% in real-world action recognition and 21.8% in multi-view robotic video alignment. Code is available at https://github.com/dominickrei/PoseAwareVT.

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.

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.

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.

PersPose: 3D Human Pose Estimation with Perspective Encoding and Perspective Rotation

Monocular 3D human pose estimation (HPE) methods estimate the 3D positions of joints from individual images. Existing 3D HPE approaches often use the cropped image alone as input for their models. However, the relative depths of joints cannot be accurately estimated from cropped images without the corresponding camera intrinsics, which determine the perspective relationship between 3D objects and the cropped images. In this work, we introduce Perspective Encoding (PE) to encode the camera intrinsics of the cropped images. Moreover, since the human subject can appear anywhere within the original image, the perspective relationship between the 3D scene and the cropped image differs significantly, which complicates model fitting. Additionally, the further the human subject deviates from the image center, the greater the perspective distortions in the cropped image. To address these issues, we propose Perspective Rotation (PR), a transformation applied to the original image that centers the human subject, thereby reducing perspective distortions and alleviating the difficulty of model fitting. By incorporating PE and PR, we propose a novel 3D HPE framework, PersPose. Experimental results demonstrate that PersPose achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the 3DPW, MPI-INF-3DHP, and Human3.6M datasets. For example, on the in-the-wild dataset 3DPW, PersPose achieves an MPJPE of 60.1 mm, 7.54% lower than the previous SOTA approach. Code is available at: https://github.com/KenAdamsJoseph/PersPose.

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.

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.

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.

Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation

Whole-body pose estimation localizes the human body, hand, face, and foot keypoints in an image. This task is challenging due to multi-scale body parts, fine-grained localization for low-resolution regions, and data scarcity. Meanwhile, applying a highly efficient and accurate pose estimator to widely human-centric understanding and generation tasks is urgent. In this work, we present a two-stage pose Distillation for Whole-body Pose estimators, named DWPose, to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. The first-stage distillation designs a weight-decay strategy while utilizing a teacher's intermediate feature and final logits with both visible and invisible keypoints to supervise the student from scratch. The second stage distills the student model itself to further improve performance. Different from the previous self-knowledge distillation, this stage finetunes the student's head with only 20% training time as a plug-and-play training strategy. For data limitations, we explore the UBody dataset that contains diverse facial expressions and hand gestures for real-life applications. Comprehensive experiments show the superiority of our proposed simple yet effective methods. We achieve new state-of-the-art performance on COCO-WholeBody, significantly boosting the whole-body AP of RTMPose-l from 64.8% to 66.5%, even surpassing RTMPose-x teacher with 65.3% AP. We release a series of models with different sizes, from tiny to large, for satisfying various downstream tasks. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/DWPose.

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/

POCO: 3D Pose and Shape Estimation with Confidence

The regression of 3D Human Pose and Shape (HPS) from an image is becoming increasingly accurate. This makes the results useful for downstream tasks like human action recognition or 3D graphics. Yet, no regressor is perfect, and accuracy can be affected by ambiguous image evidence or by poses and appearance that are unseen during training. Most current HPS regressors, however, do not report the confidence of their outputs, meaning that downstream tasks cannot differentiate accurate estimates from inaccurate ones. To address this, we develop POCO, a novel framework for training HPS regressors to estimate not only a 3D human body, but also their confidence, in a single feed-forward pass. Specifically, POCO estimates both the 3D body pose and a per-sample variance. The key idea is to introduce a Dual Conditioning Strategy (DCS) for regressing uncertainty that is highly correlated to pose reconstruction quality. The POCO framework can be applied to any HPS regressor and here we evaluate it by modifying HMR, PARE, and CLIFF. In all cases, training the network to reason about uncertainty helps it learn to more accurately estimate 3D pose. While this was not our goal, the improvement is modest but consistent. Our main motivation is to provide uncertainty estimates for downstream tasks; we demonstrate this in two ways: (1) We use the confidence estimates to bootstrap HPS training. Given unlabelled image data, we take the confident estimates of a POCO-trained regressor as pseudo ground truth. Retraining with this automatically-curated data improves accuracy. (2) We exploit uncertainty in video pose estimation by automatically identifying uncertain frames (e.g. due to occlusion) and inpainting these from confident frames. Code and models will be available for research at https://poco.is.tue.mpg.de.

Neural Interactive Keypoint Detection

This work proposes an end-to-end neural interactive keypoint detection framework named Click-Pose, which can significantly reduce more than 10 times labeling costs of 2D keypoint annotation compared with manual-only annotation. Click-Pose explores how user feedback can cooperate with a neural keypoint detector to correct the predicted keypoints in an interactive way for a faster and more effective annotation process. Specifically, we design the pose error modeling strategy that inputs the ground truth pose combined with four typical pose errors into the decoder and trains the model to reconstruct the correct poses, which enhances the self-correction ability of the model. Then, we attach an interactive human-feedback loop that allows receiving users' clicks to correct one or several predicted keypoints and iteratively utilizes the decoder to update all other keypoints with a minimum number of clicks (NoC) for efficient annotation. We validate Click-Pose in in-domain, out-of-domain scenes, and a new task of keypoint adaptation. For annotation, Click-Pose only needs 1.97 and 6.45 NoC@95 (at precision 95%) on COCO and Human-Art, reducing 31.4% and 36.3% efforts than the SOTA model (ViTPose) with manual correction, respectively. Besides, without user clicks, Click-Pose surpasses the previous end-to-end model by 1.4 AP on COCO and 3.0 AP on Human-Art. The code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Click-Pose.

GDRNPP: A Geometry-guided and Fully Learning-based Object Pose Estimator

6D pose estimation of rigid objects is a long-standing and challenging task in computer vision. Recently, the emergence of deep learning reveals the potential of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to predict reliable 6D poses. Given that direct pose regression networks currently exhibit suboptimal performance, most methods still resort to traditional techniques to varying degrees. For example, top-performing methods often adopt an indirect strategy by first establishing 2D-3D or 3D-3D correspondences followed by applying the RANSAC-based PnP or Kabsch algorithms, and further employing ICP for refinement. Despite the performance enhancement, the integration of traditional techniques makes the networks time-consuming and not end-to-end trainable. Orthogonal to them, this paper introduces a fully learning-based object pose estimator. In this work, we first perform an in-depth investigation of both direct and indirect methods and propose a simple yet effective Geometry-guided Direct Regression Network (GDRN) to learn the 6D pose from monocular images in an end-to-end manner. Afterwards, we introduce a geometry-guided pose refinement module, enhancing pose accuracy when extra depth data is available. Guided by the predicted coordinate map, we build an end-to-end differentiable architecture that establishes robust and accurate 3D-3D correspondences between the observed and rendered RGB-D images to refine the pose. Our enhanced pose estimation pipeline GDRNPP (GDRN Plus Plus) conquered the leaderboard of the BOP Challenge for two consecutive years, becoming the first to surpass all prior methods that relied on traditional techniques in both accuracy and speed. The code and models are available at https://github.com/shanice-l/gdrnpp_bop2022.

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.

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.

Portrait3D: 3D Head Generation from Single In-the-wild Portrait Image

While recent works have achieved great success on one-shot 3D common object generation, high quality and fidelity 3D head generation from a single image remains a great challenge. Previous text-based methods for generating 3D heads were limited by text descriptions and image-based methods struggled to produce high-quality head geometry. To handle this challenging problem, we propose a novel framework, Portrait3D, to generate high-quality 3D heads while preserving their identities. Our work incorporates the identity information of the portrait image into three parts: 1) geometry initialization, 2) geometry sculpting, and 3) texture generation stages. Given a reference portrait image, we first align the identity features with text features to realize ID-aware guidance enhancement, which contains the control signals representing the face information. We then use the canny map, ID features of the portrait image, and a pre-trained text-to-normal/depth diffusion model to generate ID-aware geometry supervision, and 3D-GAN inversion is employed to generate ID-aware geometry initialization. Furthermore, with the ability to inject identity information into 3D head generation, we use ID-aware guidance to calculate ID-aware Score Distillation (ISD) for geometry sculpting. For texture generation, we adopt the ID Consistent Texture Inpainting and Refinement which progressively expands the view for texture inpainting to obtain an initialization UV texture map. We then use the id-aware guidance to provide image-level supervision for noisy multi-view images to obtain a refined texture map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we can generate high-quality 3D heads with accurate geometry and texture from single in-the-wild portrait images. The project page is at https://jinkun-hao.github.io/Portrait3D/.

Manual2Skill: Learning to Read Manuals and Acquire Robotic Skills for Furniture Assembly Using Vision-Language Models

Humans possess an extraordinary ability to understand and execute complex manipulation tasks by interpreting abstract instruction manuals. For robots, however, this capability remains a substantial challenge, as they cannot interpret abstract instructions and translate them into executable actions. In this paper, we present Manual2Skill, a novel framework that enables robots to perform complex assembly tasks guided by high-level manual instructions. Our approach leverages a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to extract structured information from instructional images and then uses this information to construct hierarchical assembly graphs. These graphs represent parts, subassemblies, and the relationships between them. To facilitate task execution, a pose estimation model predicts the relative 6D poses of components at each assembly step. At the same time, a motion planning module generates actionable sequences for real-world robotic implementation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Manual2Skill by successfully assembling several real-world IKEA furniture items. This application highlights its ability to manage long-horizon manipulation tasks with both efficiency and precision, significantly enhancing the practicality of robot learning from instruction manuals. This work marks a step forward in advancing robotic systems capable of understanding and executing complex manipulation tasks in a manner akin to human capabilities.

OpenCapBench: A Benchmark to Bridge Pose Estimation and Biomechanics

Pose estimation has promised to impact healthcare by enabling more practical methods to quantify nuances of human movement and biomechanics. However, despite the inherent connection between pose estimation and biomechanics, these disciplines have largely remained disparate. For example, most current pose estimation benchmarks use metrics such as Mean Per Joint Position Error, Percentage of Correct Keypoints, or mean Average Precision to assess performance, without quantifying kinematic and physiological correctness - key aspects for biomechanics. To alleviate this challenge, we develop OpenCapBench to offer an easy-to-use unified benchmark to assess common tasks in human pose estimation, evaluated under physiological constraints. OpenCapBench computes consistent kinematic metrics through joints angles provided by an open-source musculoskeletal modeling software (OpenSim). Through OpenCapBench, we demonstrate that current pose estimation models use keypoints that are too sparse for accurate biomechanics analysis. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce SynthPose, a new approach that enables finetuning of pre-trained 2D human pose models to predict an arbitrarily denser set of keypoints for accurate kinematic analysis through the use of synthetic data. Incorporating such finetuning on synthetic data of prior models leads to twofold reduced joint angle errors. Moreover, OpenCapBench allows users to benchmark their own developed models on our clinically relevant cohort. Overall, OpenCapBench bridges the computer vision and biomechanics communities, aiming to drive simultaneous advances in both areas.

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.

Prior-guided Source-free Domain Adaptation for Human Pose Estimation

Domain adaptation methods for 2D human pose estimation typically require continuous access to the source data during adaptation, which can be challenging due to privacy, memory, or computational constraints. To address this limitation, we focus on the task of source-free domain adaptation for pose estimation, where a source model must adapt to a new target domain using only unlabeled target data. Although recent advances have introduced source-free methods for classification tasks, extending them to the regression task of pose estimation is non-trivial. In this paper, we present Prior-guided Self-training (POST), a pseudo-labeling approach that builds on the popular Mean Teacher framework to compensate for the distribution shift. POST leverages prediction-level and feature-level consistency between a student and teacher model against certain image transformations. In the absence of source data, POST utilizes a human pose prior that regularizes the adaptation process by directing the model to generate more accurate and anatomically plausible pose pseudo-labels. Despite being simple and intuitive, our framework can deliver significant performance gains compared to applying the source model directly to the target data, as demonstrated in our extensive experiments and ablation studies. In fact, our approach achieves comparable performance to recent state-of-the-art methods that use source data for adaptation.

Deep Learning-Based Object Pose Estimation: A Comprehensive Survey

Object pose estimation is a fundamental computer vision problem with broad applications in augmented reality and robotics. Over the past decade, deep learning models, due to their superior accuracy and robustness, have increasingly supplanted conventional algorithms reliant on engineered point pair features. Nevertheless, several challenges persist in contemporary methods, including their dependency on labeled training data, model compactness, robustness under challenging conditions, and their ability to generalize to novel unseen objects. A recent survey discussing the progress made on different aspects of this area, outstanding challenges, and promising future directions, is missing. To fill this gap, we discuss the recent advances in deep learning-based object pose estimation, covering all three formulations of the problem, i.e., instance-level, category-level, and unseen object pose estimation. Our survey also covers multiple input data modalities, degrees-of-freedom of output poses, object properties, and downstream tasks, providing the readers with a holistic understanding of this field. Additionally, it discusses training paradigms of different domains, inference modes, application areas, evaluation metrics, and benchmark datasets, as well as reports the performance of current state-of-the-art methods on these benchmarks, thereby facilitating the readers in selecting the most suitable method for their application. Finally, the survey identifies key challenges, reviews the prevailing trends along with their pros and cons, and identifies promising directions for future research. We also keep tracing the latest works at https://github.com/CNJianLiu/Awesome-Object-Pose-Estimation.

PromptHMR: Promptable Human Mesh Recovery

Human pose and shape (HPS) estimation presents challenges in diverse scenarios such as crowded scenes, person-person interactions, and single-view reconstruction. Existing approaches lack mechanisms to incorporate auxiliary "side information" that could enhance reconstruction accuracy in such challenging scenarios. Furthermore, the most accurate methods rely on cropped person detections and cannot exploit scene context while methods that process the whole image often fail to detect people and are less accurate than methods that use crops. While recent language-based methods explore HPS reasoning through large language or vision-language models, their metric accuracy is well below the state of the art. In contrast, we present PromptHMR, a transformer-based promptable method that reformulates HPS estimation through spatial and semantic prompts. Our method processes full images to maintain scene context and accepts multiple input modalities: spatial prompts like bounding boxes and masks, and semantic prompts like language descriptions or interaction labels. PromptHMR demonstrates robust performance across challenging scenarios: estimating people from bounding boxes as small as faces in crowded scenes, improving body shape estimation through language descriptions, modeling person-person interactions, and producing temporally coherent motions in videos. Experiments on benchmarks show that PromptHMR achieves state-of-the-art performance while offering flexible prompt-based control over the HPS estimation process.

Fusion Embedding for Pose-Guided Person Image Synthesis with Diffusion Model

Pose-Guided Person Image Synthesis (PGPIS) aims to synthesize high-quality person images corresponding to target poses while preserving the appearance of the source image. Recently, PGPIS methods that use diffusion models have achieved competitive performance. Most approaches involve extracting representations of the target pose and source image and learning their relationships in the generative model's training process. This approach makes it difficult to learn the semantic relationships between the input and target images and complicates the model structure needed to enhance generation results. To address these issues, we propose Fusion embedding for PGPIS using a Diffusion Model (FPDM). Inspired by the successful application of pre-trained CLIP models in text-to-image diffusion models, our method consists of two stages. The first stage involves training the fusion embedding of the source image and target pose to align with the target image's embedding. In the second stage, the generative model uses this fusion embedding as a condition to generate the target image. We applied the proposed method to the benchmark datasets DeepFashion and RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014T, and conducted both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, demonstrating state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. An ablation study of the model structure showed that even a model using only the second stage achieved performance close to the other PGPIS SOTA models. The code is available at https://github.com/dhlee-work/FPDM.

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/.

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.

UNOPose: Unseen Object Pose Estimation with an Unposed RGB-D Reference Image

Unseen object pose estimation methods often rely on CAD models or multiple reference views, making the onboarding stage costly. To simplify reference acquisition, we aim to estimate the unseen object's pose through a single unposed RGB-D reference image. While previous works leverage reference images as pose anchors to limit the range of relative pose, our scenario presents significant challenges since the relative transformation could vary across the entire SE(3) space. Moreover, factors like occlusion, sensor noise, and extreme geometry could result in low viewpoint overlap. To address these challenges, we present a novel approach and benchmark, termed UNOPose, for unseen one-reference-based object pose estimation. Building upon a coarse-to-fine paradigm, UNOPose constructs an SE(3)-invariant reference frame to standardize object representation despite pose and size variations. To alleviate small overlap across viewpoints, we recalibrate the weight of each correspondence based on its predicted likelihood of being within the overlapping region. Evaluated on our proposed benchmark based on the BOP Challenge, UNOPose demonstrates superior performance, significantly outperforming traditional and learning-based methods in the one-reference setting and remaining competitive with CAD-model-based methods. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/shanice-l/UNOPose.

VideoJAM: Joint Appearance-Motion Representations for Enhanced Motion Generation in Video Models

Despite tremendous recent progress, generative video models still struggle to capture real-world motion, dynamics, and physics. We show that this limitation arises from the conventional pixel reconstruction objective, which biases models toward appearance fidelity at the expense of motion coherence. To address this, we introduce VideoJAM, a novel framework that instills an effective motion prior to video generators, by encouraging the model to learn a joint appearance-motion representation. VideoJAM is composed of two complementary units. During training, we extend the objective to predict both the generated pixels and their corresponding motion from a single learned representation. During inference, we introduce Inner-Guidance, a mechanism that steers the generation toward coherent motion by leveraging the model's own evolving motion prediction as a dynamic guidance signal. Notably, our framework can be applied to any video model with minimal adaptations, requiring no modifications to the training data or scaling of the model. VideoJAM achieves state-of-the-art performance in motion coherence, surpassing highly competitive proprietary models while also enhancing the perceived visual quality of the generations. These findings emphasize that appearance and motion can be complementary and, when effectively integrated, enhance both the visual quality and the coherence of video generation. Project website: https://hila-chefer.github.io/videojam-paper.github.io/

FaVoR: Features via Voxel Rendering for Camera Relocalization

Camera relocalization methods range from dense image alignment to direct camera pose regression from a query image. Among these, sparse feature matching stands out as an efficient, versatile, and generally lightweight approach with numerous applications. However, feature-based methods often struggle with significant viewpoint and appearance changes, leading to matching failures and inaccurate pose estimates. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach that leverages a globally sparse yet locally dense 3D representation of 2D features. By tracking and triangulating landmarks over a sequence of frames, we construct a sparse voxel map optimized to render image patch descriptors observed during tracking. Given an initial pose estimate, we first synthesize descriptors from the voxels using volumetric rendering and then perform feature matching to estimate the camera pose. This methodology enables the generation of descriptors for unseen views, enhancing robustness to view changes. We extensively evaluate our method on the 7-Scenes and Cambridge Landmarks datasets. Our results show that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art feature representation techniques in indoor environments, achieving up to a 39% improvement in median translation error. Additionally, our approach yields comparable results to other methods for outdoor scenarios while maintaining lower memory and computational costs.

Object Pose Estimation with Statistical Guarantees: Conformal Keypoint Detection and Geometric Uncertainty Propagation

The two-stage object pose estimation paradigm first detects semantic keypoints on the image and then estimates the 6D pose by minimizing reprojection errors. Despite performing well on standard benchmarks, existing techniques offer no provable guarantees on the quality and uncertainty of the estimation. In this paper, we inject two fundamental changes, namely conformal keypoint detection and geometric uncertainty propagation, into the two-stage paradigm and propose the first pose estimator that endows an estimation with provable and computable worst-case error bounds. On one hand, conformal keypoint detection applies the statistical machinery of inductive conformal prediction to convert heuristic keypoint detections into circular or elliptical prediction sets that cover the groundtruth keypoints with a user-specified marginal probability (e.g., 90%). Geometric uncertainty propagation, on the other, propagates the geometric constraints on the keypoints to the 6D object pose, leading to a Pose UnceRtainty SEt (PURSE) that guarantees coverage of the groundtruth pose with the same probability. The PURSE, however, is a nonconvex set that does not directly lead to estimated poses and uncertainties. Therefore, we develop RANdom SAmple averaGing (RANSAG) to compute an average pose and apply semidefinite relaxation to upper bound the worst-case errors between the average pose and the groundtruth. On the LineMOD Occlusion dataset we demonstrate: (i) the PURSE covers the groundtruth with valid probabilities; (ii) the worst-case error bounds provide correct uncertainty quantification; and (iii) the average pose achieves better or similar accuracy as representative methods based on sparse keypoints.

6D Object Pose Tracking in Internet Videos for Robotic Manipulation

We seek to extract a temporally consistent 6D pose trajectory of a manipulated object from an Internet instructional video. This is a challenging set-up for current 6D pose estimation methods due to uncontrolled capturing conditions, subtle but dynamic object motions, and the fact that the exact mesh of the manipulated object is not known. To address these challenges, we present the following contributions. First, we develop a new method that estimates the 6D pose of any object in the input image without prior knowledge of the object itself. The method proceeds by (i) retrieving a CAD model similar to the depicted object from a large-scale model database, (ii) 6D aligning the retrieved CAD model with the input image, and (iii) grounding the absolute scale of the object with respect to the scene. Second, we extract smooth 6D object trajectories from Internet videos by carefully tracking the detected objects across video frames. The extracted object trajectories are then retargeted via trajectory optimization into the configuration space of a robotic manipulator. Third, we thoroughly evaluate and ablate our 6D pose estimation method on YCB-V and HOPE-Video datasets as well as a new dataset of instructional videos manually annotated with approximate 6D object trajectories. We demonstrate significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art RGB 6D pose estimation methods. Finally, we show that the 6D object motion estimated from Internet videos can be transferred to a 7-axis robotic manipulator both in a virtual simulator as well as in a real world set-up. We also successfully apply our method to egocentric videos taken from the EPIC-KITCHENS dataset, demonstrating potential for Embodied AI applications.

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\%.

EgoPoseFormer: A Simple Baseline for Stereo Egocentric 3D Human Pose Estimation

We present EgoPoseFormer, a simple yet effective transformer-based model for stereo egocentric human pose estimation. The main challenge in egocentric pose estimation is overcoming joint invisibility, which is caused by self-occlusion or a limited field of view (FOV) of head-mounted cameras. Our approach overcomes this challenge by incorporating a two-stage pose estimation paradigm: in the first stage, our model leverages the global information to estimate each joint's coarse location, then in the second stage, it employs a DETR style transformer to refine the coarse locations by exploiting fine-grained stereo visual features. In addition, we present a Deformable Stereo Attention operation to enable our transformer to effectively process multi-view features, which enables it to accurately localize each joint in the 3D world. We evaluate our method on the stereo UnrealEgo dataset and show it significantly outperforms previous approaches while being computationally efficient: it improves MPJPE by 27.4mm (45% improvement) with only 7.9% model parameters and 13.1% FLOPs compared to the state-of-the-art. Surprisingly, with proper training settings, we find that even our first-stage pose proposal network can achieve superior performance compared to previous arts. We also show that our method can be seamlessly extended to monocular settings, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SceneEgo dataset, improving MPJPE by 25.5mm (21% improvement) compared to the best existing method with only 60.7% model parameters and 36.4% FLOPs. Code is available at: https://github.com/ChenhongyiYang/egoposeformer .

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.

AnimateAnywhere: Rouse the Background in Human Image Animation

Human image animation aims to generate human videos of given characters and backgrounds that adhere to the desired pose sequence. However, existing methods focus more on human actions while neglecting the generation of background, which typically leads to static results or inharmonious movements. The community has explored camera pose-guided animation tasks, yet preparing the camera trajectory is impractical for most entertainment applications and ordinary users. As a remedy, we present an AnimateAnywhere framework, rousing the background in human image animation without requirements on camera trajectories. In particular, based on our key insight that the movement of the human body often reflects the motion of the background, we introduce a background motion learner (BML) to learn background motions from human pose sequences. To encourage the model to learn more accurate cross-frame correspondences, we further deploy an epipolar constraint on the 3D attention map. Specifically, the mask used to suppress geometrically unreasonable attention is carefully constructed by combining an epipolar mask and the current 3D attention map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AnimateAnywhere effectively learns the background motion from human pose sequences, achieving state-of-the-art performance in generating human animation results with vivid and realistic backgrounds. The source code and model will be available at https://github.com/liuxiaoyu1104/AnimateAnywhere.

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.

HaLP: Hallucinating Latent Positives for Skeleton-based Self-Supervised Learning of Actions

Supervised learning of skeleton sequence encoders for action recognition has received significant attention in recent times. However, learning such encoders without labels continues to be a challenging problem. While prior works have shown promising results by applying contrastive learning to pose sequences, the quality of the learned representations is often observed to be closely tied to data augmentations that are used to craft the positives. However, augmenting pose sequences is a difficult task as the geometric constraints among the skeleton joints need to be enforced to make the augmentations realistic for that action. In this work, we propose a new contrastive learning approach to train models for skeleton-based action recognition without labels. Our key contribution is a simple module, HaLP - to Hallucinate Latent Positives for contrastive learning. Specifically, HaLP explores the latent space of poses in suitable directions to generate new positives. To this end, we present a novel optimization formulation to solve for the synthetic positives with an explicit control on their hardness. We propose approximations to the objective, making them solvable in closed form with minimal overhead. We show via experiments that using these generated positives within a standard contrastive learning framework leads to consistent improvements across benchmarks such as NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-II on tasks like linear evaluation, transfer learning, and kNN evaluation. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/anshulbshah/HaLP.

PoseTalk: Text-and-Audio-based Pose Control and Motion Refinement for One-Shot Talking Head Generation

While previous audio-driven talking head generation (THG) methods generate head poses from driving audio, the generated poses or lips cannot match the audio well or are not editable. In this study, we propose PoseTalk, a THG system that can freely generate lip-synchronized talking head videos with free head poses conditioned on text prompts and audio. The core insight of our method is using head pose to connect visual, linguistic, and audio signals. First, we propose to generate poses from both audio and text prompts, where the audio offers short-term variations and rhythm correspondence of the head movements and the text prompts describe the long-term semantics of head motions. To achieve this goal, we devise a Pose Latent Diffusion (PLD) model to generate motion latent from text prompts and audio cues in a pose latent space. Second, we observe a loss-imbalance problem: the loss for the lip region contributes less than 4\% of the total reconstruction loss caused by both pose and lip, making optimization lean towards head movements rather than lip shapes. To address this issue, we propose a refinement-based learning strategy to synthesize natural talking videos using two cascaded networks, i.e., CoarseNet, and RefineNet. The CoarseNet estimates coarse motions to produce animated images in novel poses and the RefineNet focuses on learning finer lip motions by progressively estimating lip motions from low-to-high resolutions, yielding improved lip-synchronization performance. Experiments demonstrate our pose prediction strategy achieves better pose diversity and realness compared to text-only or audio-only, and our video generator model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in synthesizing talking videos with natural head motions. Project: https://junleen.github.io/projects/posetalk.

Follow-Your-Emoji: Fine-Controllable and Expressive Freestyle Portrait Animation

We present Follow-Your-Emoji, a diffusion-based framework for portrait animation, which animates a reference portrait with target landmark sequences. The main challenge of portrait animation is to preserve the identity of the reference portrait and transfer the target expression to this portrait while maintaining temporal consistency and fidelity. To address these challenges, Follow-Your-Emoji equipped the powerful Stable Diffusion model with two well-designed technologies. Specifically, we first adopt a new explicit motion signal, namely expression-aware landmark, to guide the animation process. We discover this landmark can not only ensure the accurate motion alignment between the reference portrait and target motion during inference but also increase the ability to portray exaggerated expressions (i.e., large pupil movements) and avoid identity leakage. Then, we propose a facial fine-grained loss to improve the model's ability of subtle expression perception and reference portrait appearance reconstruction by using both expression and facial masks. Accordingly, our method demonstrates significant performance in controlling the expression of freestyle portraits, including real humans, cartoons, sculptures, and even animals. By leveraging a simple and effective progressive generation strategy, we extend our model to stable long-term animation, thus increasing its potential application value. To address the lack of a benchmark for this field, we introduce EmojiBench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising diverse portrait images, driving videos, and landmarks. We show extensive evaluations on EmojiBench to verify the superiority of Follow-Your-Emoji.

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.

Pose Anything: A Graph-Based Approach for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation

Traditional 2D pose estimation models are limited by their category-specific design, making them suitable only for predefined object categories. This restriction becomes particularly challenging when dealing with novel objects due to the lack of relevant training data. To address this limitation, category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) was introduced. CAPE aims to enable keypoint localization for arbitrary object categories using a single model, requiring minimal support images with annotated keypoints. This approach not only enables object pose generation based on arbitrary keypoint definitions but also significantly reduces the associated costs, paving the way for versatile and adaptable pose estimation applications. We present a novel approach to CAPE that leverages the inherent geometrical relations between keypoints through a newly designed Graph Transformer Decoder. By capturing and incorporating this crucial structural information, our method enhances the accuracy of keypoint localization, marking a significant departure from conventional CAPE techniques that treat keypoints as isolated entities. We validate our approach on the MP-100 benchmark, a comprehensive dataset comprising over 20,000 images spanning more than 100 categories. Our method outperforms the prior state-of-the-art by substantial margins, achieving remarkable improvements of 2.16% and 1.82% under 1-shot and 5-shot settings, respectively. Furthermore, our method's end-to-end training demonstrates both scalability and efficiency compared to previous CAPE approaches.

GIVEPose: Gradual Intra-class Variation Elimination for RGB-based Category-Level Object Pose Estimation

Recent advances in RGBD-based category-level object pose estimation have been limited by their reliance on precise depth information, restricting their broader applicability. In response, RGB-based methods have been developed. Among these methods, geometry-guided pose regression that originated from instance-level tasks has demonstrated strong performance. However, we argue that the NOCS map is an inadequate intermediate representation for geometry-guided pose regression method, as its many-to-one correspondence with category-level pose introduces redundant instance-specific information, resulting in suboptimal results. This paper identifies the intra-class variation problem inherent in pose regression based solely on the NOCS map and proposes the Intra-class Variation-Free Consensus (IVFC) map, a novel coordinate representation generated from the category-level consensus model. By leveraging the complementary strengths of the NOCS map and the IVFC map, we introduce GIVEPose, a framework that implements Gradual Intra-class Variation Elimination for category-level object pose estimation. Extensive evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that GIVEPose significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art RGB-based approaches, achieving substantial improvements in category-level object pose estimation. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziqin-h/GIVEPose.

FlexiAct: Towards Flexible Action Control in Heterogeneous Scenarios

Action customization involves generating videos where the subject performs actions dictated by input control signals. Current methods use pose-guided or global motion customization but are limited by strict constraints on spatial structure, such as layout, skeleton, and viewpoint consistency, reducing adaptability across diverse subjects and scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose FlexiAct, which transfers actions from a reference video to an arbitrary target image. Unlike existing methods, FlexiAct allows for variations in layout, viewpoint, and skeletal structure between the subject of the reference video and the target image, while maintaining identity consistency. Achieving this requires precise action control, spatial structure adaptation, and consistency preservation. To this end, we introduce RefAdapter, a lightweight image-conditioned adapter that excels in spatial adaptation and consistency preservation, surpassing existing methods in balancing appearance consistency and structural flexibility. Additionally, based on our observations, the denoising process exhibits varying levels of attention to motion (low frequency) and appearance details (high frequency) at different timesteps. So we propose FAE (Frequency-aware Action Extraction), which, unlike existing methods that rely on separate spatial-temporal architectures, directly achieves action extraction during the denoising process. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively transfers actions to subjects with diverse layouts, skeletons, and viewpoints. We release our code and model weights to support further research at https://shiyi-zh0408.github.io/projectpages/FlexiAct/

Rethinking pose estimation in crowds: overcoming the detection information-bottleneck and ambiguity

Frequent interactions between individuals are a fundamental challenge for pose estimation algorithms. Current pipelines either use an object detector together with a pose estimator (top-down approach), or localize all body parts first and then link them to predict the pose of individuals (bottom-up). Yet, when individuals closely interact, top-down methods are ill-defined due to overlapping individuals, and bottom-up methods often falsely infer connections to distant body parts. Thus, we propose a novel pipeline called bottom-up conditioned top-down pose estimation (BUCTD) that combines the strengths of bottom-up and top-down methods. Specifically, we propose to use a bottom-up model as the detector, which in addition to an estimated bounding box provides a pose proposal that is fed as condition to an attention-based top-down model. We demonstrate the performance and efficiency of our approach on animal and human pose estimation benchmarks. On CrowdPose and OCHuman, we outperform previous state-of-the-art models by a significant margin. We achieve 78.5 AP on CrowdPose and 47.2 AP on OCHuman, an improvement of 8.6% and 4.9% over the prior art, respectively. Furthermore, we show that our method has excellent performance on non-crowded datasets such as COCO, and strongly improves the performance on multi-animal benchmarks involving mice, fish and monkeys.

BLADE: Single-view Body Mesh Learning through Accurate Depth Estimation

Single-image human mesh recovery is a challenging task due to the ill-posed nature of simultaneous body shape, pose, and camera estimation. Existing estimators work well on images taken from afar, but they break down as the person moves close to the camera. Moreover, current methods fail to achieve both accurate 3D pose and 2D alignment at the same time. Error is mainly introduced by inaccurate perspective projection heuristically derived from orthographic parameters. To resolve this long-standing challenge, we present our method BLADE which accurately recovers perspective parameters from a single image without heuristic assumptions. We start from the inverse relationship between perspective distortion and the person's Z-translation Tz, and we show that Tz can be reliably estimated from the image. We then discuss the important role of Tz for accurate human mesh recovery estimated from close-range images. Finally, we show that, once Tz and the 3D human mesh are estimated, one can accurately recover the focal length and full 3D translation. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks and real-world close-range images show that our method is the first to accurately recover projection parameters from a single image, and consequently attain state-of-the-art accuracy on 3D pose estimation and 2D alignment for a wide range of images. https://research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/projects/blade/

PoP-Net: Pose over Parts Network for Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation from a Depth Image

In this paper, a real-time method called PoP-Net is proposed to predict multi-person 3D poses from a depth image. PoP-Net learns to predict bottom-up part representations and top-down global poses in a single shot. Specifically, a new part-level representation, called Truncated Part Displacement Field (TPDF), is introduced which enables an explicit fusion process to unify the advantages of bottom-up part detection and global pose detection. Meanwhile, an effective mode selection scheme is introduced to automatically resolve the conflicting cases between global pose and part detections. Finally, due to the lack of high-quality depth datasets for developing multi-person 3D pose estimation, we introduce Multi-Person 3D Human Pose Dataset (MP-3DHP) as a new benchmark. MP-3DHP is designed to enable effective multi-person and background data augmentation in model training, and to evaluate 3D human pose estimators under uncontrolled multi-person scenarios. We show that PoP-Net achieves the state-of-the-art results both on MP-3DHP and on the widely used ITOP dataset, and has significant advantages in efficiency for multi-person processing. To demonstrate one of the applications of our algorithm pipeline, we also show results of virtual avatars driven by our calculated 3D joint positions. MP-3DHP Dataset and the evaluation code have been made available at: https://github.com/oppo-us-research/PoP-Net.

MVD-HuGaS: Human Gaussians from a Single Image via 3D Human Multi-view Diffusion Prior

3D human reconstruction from a single image is a challenging problem and has been exclusively studied in the literature. Recently, some methods have resorted to diffusion models for guidance, optimizing a 3D representation via Score Distillation Sampling(SDS) or generating one back-view image for facilitating reconstruction. However, these methods tend to produce unsatisfactory artifacts (e.g. flattened human structure or over-smoothing results caused by inconsistent priors from multiple views) and struggle with real-world generalization in the wild. In this work, we present MVD-HuGaS, enabling free-view 3D human rendering from a single image via a multi-view human diffusion model. We first generate multi-view images from the single reference image with an enhanced multi-view diffusion model, which is well fine-tuned on high-quality 3D human datasets to incorporate 3D geometry priors and human structure priors. To infer accurate camera poses from the sparse generated multi-view images for reconstruction, an alignment module is introduced to facilitate joint optimization of 3D Gaussians and camera poses. Furthermore, we propose a depth-based Facial Distortion Mitigation module to refine the generated facial regions, thereby improving the overall fidelity of the reconstruction.Finally, leveraging the refined multi-view images, along with their accurate camera poses, MVD-HuGaS optimizes the 3D Gaussians of the target human for high-fidelity free-view renderings. Extensive experiments on Thuman2.0 and 2K2K datasets show that the proposed MVD-HuGaS achieves state-of-the-art performance on single-view 3D human rendering.

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.

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.

DirectMHP: Direct 2D Multi-Person Head Pose Estimation with Full-range Angles

Existing head pose estimation (HPE) mainly focuses on single person with pre-detected frontal heads, which limits their applications in real complex scenarios with multi-persons. We argue that these single HPE methods are fragile and inefficient for Multi-Person Head Pose Estimation (MPHPE) since they rely on the separately trained face detector that cannot generalize well to full viewpoints, especially for heads with invisible face areas. In this paper, we focus on the full-range MPHPE problem, and propose a direct end-to-end simple baseline named DirectMHP. Due to the lack of datasets applicable to the full-range MPHPE, we firstly construct two benchmarks by extracting ground-truth labels for head detection and head orientation from public datasets AGORA and CMU Panoptic. They are rather challenging for having many truncated, occluded, tiny and unevenly illuminated human heads. Then, we design a novel end-to-end trainable one-stage network architecture by joint regressing locations and orientations of multi-head to address the MPHPE problem. Specifically, we regard pose as an auxiliary attribute of the head, and append it after the traditional object prediction. Arbitrary pose representation such as Euler angles is acceptable by this flexible design. Then, we jointly optimize these two tasks by sharing features and utilizing appropriate multiple losses. In this way, our method can implicitly benefit from more surroundings to improve HPE accuracy while maintaining head detection performance. We present comprehensive comparisons with state-of-the-art single HPE methods on public benchmarks, as well as superior baseline results on our constructed MPHPE datasets. Datasets and code are released in https://github.com/hnuzhy/DirectMHP.

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.