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Autonomous driving is an exciting new industry, posing important research questions. Within the perception module, 3D human pose estimation is an emerging technology, which can enable the autonomous vehicle to perceive and understand the subtle and complex behaviors of pedestrians. While hardware systems and sensors have dramatically improved over the decades -- with cars potentially boasting complex LiDAR and vision systems and with a growing expansion of the available body of dedicated datasets for this newly available information -- not much work has been done to harness these novel signals for the core problem of 3D human pose estimation. Our method, which we coin HUM3DIL (HUMan 3D from Images and LiDAR), efficiently makes use of these complementary signals, in a semi-supervised fashion and outperforms existing methods with a large margin. It is a fast and compact model for onboard deployment. Specifically, we embed LiDAR points into pixel-aligned multi-modal features, which we pass through a sequence of Transformer refinement stages. Quantitative experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset support these claims, where we achieve state-of-the-art results on the task of 3D pose estimation., Published at the 6th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2022), Auckland, New Zealand

We introduce Structured 3D Features, a model based on a novel implicit 3D representation that pools pixel-aligned image features onto dense 3D points sampled from a parametric, statistical human mesh surface. The 3D points have associated semantics and can move freely in 3D space. This allows for optimal coverage of the person of interest, beyond just the body shape, which in turn, additionally helps modeling accessories, hair, and loose clothing. Owing to this, we present a complete 3D transformer-based attention framework which, given a single image of a person in an unconstrained pose, generates an animatable 3D reconstruction with albedo and illumination decomposition, as a result of a single end-to-end model, trained semi-supervised, and with no additional postprocessing. We show that our S3F model surpasses the previous state-of-the-art on various tasks, including monocular 3D reconstruction, as well as albedo and shading estimation. Moreover, we show that the proposed methodology allows novel view synthesis, relighting, and re-posing the reconstruction, and can naturally be extended to handle multiple input images (e.g. different views of a person, or the same view, in different poses, in video). Finally, we demonstrate the editing capabilities of our model for 3D virtual try-on applications., Accepted at CVPR 2023. Project page: https://enriccorona.github.io/s3f/, Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcZGcQ6L-2s

Monocular estimation of three dimensional human self-contact is fundamental for detailed scene analysis including body language understanding and behaviour modeling. Existing 3d reconstruction methods do not focus on body regions in self-contact and consequently recover configurations that are either far from each other or self-intersecting, when they should just touch. This leads to perceptually incorrect estimates and limits impact in those very fine-grained analysis domains where detailed 3d models are expected to play an important role. To address such challenges we detect self-contact and design 3d losses to explicitly enforce it. Specifically, we develop a model for Self-Contact Prediction (SCP), that estimates the body surface signature of self-contact, leveraging the localization of self-contact in the image, during both training and inference. We collect two large datasets to support learning and evaluation: (1) HumanSC3D, an accurate 3d motion capture repository containing $1,032$ sequences with $5,058$ contact events and $1,246,487$ ground truth 3d poses synchronized with images collected from multiple views, and (2) FlickrSC3D, a repository of $3,969$ images, containing $25,297$ surface-to-surface correspondences with annotated image spatial support. We also illustrate how more expressive 3d reconstructions can be recovered under self-contact signature constraints and present monocular detection of face-touch as one of the multiple applications made possible by more accurate self-contact models., To be published in the Proceedings of the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2021)

We present BlazePose GHUM Holistic, a lightweight neural network pipeline for 3D human body landmarks and pose estimation, specifically tailored to real-time on-device inference. BlazePose GHUM Holistic enables motion capture from a single RGB image including avatar control, fitness tracking and AR/VR effects. Our main contributions include i) a novel method for 3D ground truth data acquisition, ii) updated 3D body tracking with additional hand landmarks and iii) full body pose estimation from a monocular image., 4 pages, 4 figures; CVPR Workshop on Computer Vision for Augmented and Virtual Reality, New Orleans, LA, 2022

We present PHORHUM, a novel, end-to-end trainable, deep neural network methodology for photorealistic 3D human reconstruction given just a monocular RGB image. Our pixel-aligned method estimates detailed 3D geometry and, for the first time, the unshaded surface color together with the scene illumination. Observing that 3D supervision alone is not sufficient for high fidelity color reconstruction, we introduce patch-based rendering losses that enable reliable color reconstruction on visible parts of the human, and detailed and plausible color estimation for the non-visible parts. Moreover, our method specifically addresses methodological and practical limitations of prior work in terms of representing geometry, albedo, and illumination effects, in an end-to-end model where factors can be effectively disentangled. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate the versatility and robustness of our approach. Our state-of-the-art results validate the method qualitatively and for different metrics, for both geometric and color reconstruction., https://phorhum.github.io/

We present PhoMoH, a neural network methodology to construct generative models of photo-realistic 3D geometry and appearance of human heads including hair, beards, an oral cavity, and clothing. In contrast to prior work, PhoMoH models the human head using neural fields, thus supporting complex topology. Instead of learning a head model from scratch, we propose to augment an existing expressive head model with new features. Concretely, we learn a highly detailed geometry network layered on top of a mid-resolution head model together with a detailed, local geometry-aware, and disentangled color field. Our proposed architecture allows us to learn photo-realistic human head models from relatively little data. The learned generative geometry and appearance networks can be sampled individually and enable the creation of diverse and realistic human heads. Extensive experiments validate our method qualitatively and across different metrics.

Advances in the state of the art for 3d human sensing are currently limited by the lack of visual datasets with 3d ground truth, including multiple people, in motion, operating in real-world environments, with complex illumination or occlusion, and potentially observed by a moving camera. Sophisticated scene understanding would require estimating human pose and shape as well as gestures, towards representations that ultimately combine useful metric and behavioral signals with free-viewpoint photo-realistic visualisation capabilities. To sustain progress, we build a large-scale photo-realistic dataset, Human-SPACE (HSPACE), of animated humans placed in complex synthetic indoor and outdoor environments. We combine a hundred diverse individuals of varying ages, gender, proportions, and ethnicity, with hundreds of motions and scenes, as well as parametric variations in body shape (for a total of 1,600 different humans), in order to generate an initial dataset of over 1 million frames. Human animations are obtained by fitting an expressive human body model, GHUM, to single scans of people, followed by novel re-targeting and positioning procedures that support the realistic animation of dressed humans, statistical variation of body proportions, and jointly consistent scene placement of multiple moving people. Assets are generated automatically, at scale, and are compatible with existing real time rendering and game engines. The dataset with evaluation server will be made available for research. Our large-scale analysis of the impact of synthetic data, in connection with real data and weak supervision, underlines the considerable potential for continuing quality improvements and limiting the sim-to-real gap, in this practical setting, in connection with increased model capacity.

Automatic video captioning is challenging due to the complex interactions in dynamic real scenes. A comprehensive system would ultimately localize and track the objects, actions and interactions present in a video and generate a description that relies on temporal localization in order to ground the visual concepts. However, most existing automatic video captioning systems map from raw video data to high level textual description, bypassing localization and recognition, thus discarding potentially valuable information for content localization and generalization. In this work we present an automatic video captioning model that combines spatio-temporal attention and image classification by means of deep neural network structures based on long short-term memory. The resulting system is demonstrated to produce state-of-the-art results in the standard YouTube captioning benchmark while also offering the advantage of localizing the visual concepts (subjects, verbs, objects), with no grounding supervision, over space and time., To appear in Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), Taipei, Taiwan, 2016