We address the problem of human motion tracking by registering a surface to 3-D data. We propose a method that iteratively computes two things: Maximum likelihood estimates for both the kinematic and free-motion parameters of a kinematic human-body representation, as well as probabilities that the data are assigned either to a body part, or to an outlier cluster. We introduce a new metric between observed points and normals on one side, and a parameterized surface on the other side, the latter being defined as a blending over a set of ellipsoids. We claim that this metric is well suited when one deals with either visual-hull or visual-shape observations. We illustrate the method by tracking human motions using sparse visual-shape data (3-D surface points and normals) gathered from imperfect silhouettes.
Bioinformatics Institute, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局生物信息学研究所）
Pose estimation, tracking, and action recognition of articulated objects from depth images are important and challenging problems, which are normally considered separately. In this paper, a unified paradigm based on Lie group theory is proposed, which enables us to collectively address these related problems. Our approach is also applicable to a wide range of articulated objects. Empirically it is evaluated on lab animals including mouse and fish, as well as on human hand. On these applications, it is shown to deliver competitive results compared to the state-of-the-arts, and non-trivial basel…
The last several years have seen significant progress in using depth cameras for tracking articulated objects such as human bodies, hands, and robotic manipulators. Most approaches focus on tracking skeletal parameters of a fixed shape model, which makes them insufficient for applications that require accurate estimates of deformable object surfaces. To overcome this limitation, we present a 3D model-based tracking system for articulated deformable objects. Our system is able to track human body pose and high resolution surface contours in real time using a commodity depth sensor and GPU hardw…
Particle Filter is an effective solution to track objects in video sequences in complex situations. Its key idea is to estimate the density over the possible states of the object using a weighted sample whose elements are called particles. One of its crucial step is a resampling step in which particles are resampled to avoid some degeneracy problem. In this paper, we introduce a new resampling method called Combinatorial Resampling that exploits some features of articulated objects to resample over an implicitly created sample of an exponential size better representing the density to estimate.…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Saarland Informatics Campus（萨尔兰信息学园区）
In this paper we propose an approach for articulated tracking of multiple people in unconstrained videos. Our starting point is a model that resembles existing architectures for single-frame pose estimation but is substantially faster. We achieve this in two ways: (1) by simplifying and sparsifying the body-part relationship graph and leveraging recent methods for faster inference, and (2) by offloading a substantial share of computation onto a feed-forward convolutional architecture that is able to detect and associate body joints of the same person even in clutter. We use this model to gener…
Both the tasks of multi-person human pose estimation and pose tracking in videos are quite challenging. Existing methods can be categorized into two groups: top-down and bottom-up approaches. In this paper, following the top-down approach, we aim to build a strong baseline system with three modules: human candidate detector, single-person pose estimator and human pose tracker. Firstly, we choose a generic object detector among state-of-the-art methods to detect human candidates. Then, the cascaded pyramid network is used to estimate the corresponding human pose. Finally, we use a flow-based po…
Queensland University of Technology (QUT)（昆士兰科技大学）
This paper presents a method which can track and 3D reconstruct the non-rigid surface motion of human performance using a moving RGB-D camera. 3D reconstruction of marker-less human performance is a challenging problem due to the large range of articulated motions and considerable non-rigid deformations. Current approaches use local optimization for tracking. These methods need many iterations to converge and may get stuck in local minima during sudden articulated movements. We propose a puppet model-based tracking approach using skeleton prior, which provides a better initialization for track…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；SenseTime Computer Vision Research Group（商汤科技计算机视觉研究组）
We propose a unified framework for multi-person pose estimation and tracking. Our framework consists of two main components,~\ie~SpatialNet and TemporalNet. The SpatialNet accomplishes body part detection and part-level data association in a single frame, while the TemporalNet groups human instances in consecutive frames into trajectories. Specifically, besides body part detection heatmaps, SpatialNet also predicts the Keypoint Embedding (KE) and Spatial Instance Embedding (SIE) for body part association. We model the grouping procedure into a differentiable Pose-Guided Grouping (PGG) module t…
Peking University（北京大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）；UCSD（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）；Beijing Institute for General AI（北京通用人工智能研究院）
In this work, we tackle the problem of category-level online pose tracking of objects from point cloud sequences. For the first time, we propose a unified framework that can handle 9DoF pose tracking for novel rigid object instances as well as per-part pose tracking for articulated objects from known categories. Here the 9DoF pose, comprising 6D pose and 3D size, is equivalent to a 3D amodal bounding box representation with free 6D pose. Given the depth point cloud at the current frame and the estimated pose from the last frame, our novel end-to-end pipeline learns to accurately update the pos…
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
Although commercial and open-source software exist to reconstruct a static object from a sequence recorded with an RGB-D sensor, there is a lack of tools that build rigged models of articulated objects that deform realistically and can be used for tracking or animation. In this work, we fill this gap and propose a method that creates a fully rigged model of an articulated object from depth data of a single sensor. To this end, we combine deformable mesh tracking, motion segmentation based on spectral clustering and skeletonization based on mean curvature flow. The fully rigged model then consi…
In robotic surgery, tool tracking is important for providing safe tool-tissue interaction and facilitating surgical skills assessment. Despite recent advances in tool tracking, existing approaches are faced with major difficulties in real-time tracking of articulated tools. Most algorithms are tailored for offline processing with pre-recorded videos. In this paper, we propose a real-time 3D tracking method for articulated tools in robotic surgery. The proposed method is based on the CAD model of the tools as well as robot kinematics to generate online part-based templates for efficient 2D matc…
TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Robots deployed in human-centric environments may need to manipulate a diverse range of articulated objects, such as doors, dishwashers, and cabinets. Articulated objects often come with unexpected articulation mechanisms that are inconsistent with categorical priors: for example, a drawer might rotate about a hinge joint instead of sliding open. We propose a category-independent framework for predicting the articulation models of unknown objects from sequences of RGB-D images. The prediction is performed by a two-step process: first, a visual perception module tracks object part poses from ra…
MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Amazon Research（亚马逊研究院）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Human poses and motions are important cues for analysis of videos with people and there is strong evidence that representations based on body pose are highly effective for a variety of tasks such as activity recognition, content retrieval and social signal processing. In this work, we aim to further advance the state of the art by establishing "PoseTrack", a new large-scale benchmark for video-based human pose estimation and articulated tracking, and bringing together the community of researchers working on visual human analysis. The benchmark encompasses three competition tracks focusing on i…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Efficient representation of articulated objects such as human bodies is an important problem in computer vision and graphics. To efficiently simulate deformation, existing approaches represent 3D objects using polygonal meshes and deform them using skinning techniques. This paper introduces neural articulated shape approximation (NASA), an alternative framework that enables efficient representation of articulated deformable objects using neural indicator functions that are conditioned on pose. Occupancy testing using NASA is straightforward, circumventing the complexity of meshes and the issue…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Robotics Institute, University of Michigan（密歇根大学机器人研究所）
Next generation robots will need to understand intricate and articulated objects as they cooperate in human environments. To do so, these robots will need to move beyond their current abilities--- working with relatively simple objects in a task-indifferent manner--- toward more sophisticated abilities that dynamically estimate the properties of complex, articulated objects. To that end, we make two compelling contributions toward general articulated (physical) object understanding in this paper. First, we introduce a new dataset, SPARE: Simulated and Physical ARticulated Extendable dataset. S…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Reality Labs at Meta（Meta现实实验室）
Today's Mixed Reality head-mounted displays track the user's head pose in world space as well as the user's hands for interaction in both Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality scenarios. While this is adequate to support user input, it unfortunately limits users' virtual representations to just their upper bodies. Current systems thus resort to floating avatars, whose limitation is particularly evident in collaborative settings. To estimate full-body poses from the sparse input sources, prior work has incorporated additional trackers and sensors at the pelvis or lower body, which increases set…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Dynamic Object-aware SLAM (DOS) exploits object-level information to enable robust motion estimation in dynamic environments. Existing methods mainly focus on identifying and excluding dynamic objects from the optimization. In this paper, we show that feature-based visual SLAM systems can also benefit from the presence of dynamic articulated objects by taking advantage of two observations: (1) The 3D structure of each rigid part of articulated object remains consistent over time; (2) The points on the same rigid part follow the same motion. In particular, we present AirDOS, a dynamic object-aw…
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Reality Labs Research（现实实验室研究部门）
Deep learning greatly improved the realism of animatable human models by learning geometry and appearance from collections of 3D scans, template meshes, and multi-view imagery. High-resolution models enable photo-realistic avatars but at the cost of requiring studio settings not available to end users. Our goal is to create avatars directly from raw images without relying on expensive studio setups and surface tracking. While a few such approaches exist, those have limited generalization capabilities and are prone to learning spurious (chance) correlations between irrelevant body parts, result…
Model based methods to marker-free motion capture have a very high computational overhead that make them unattractive. In this paper we describe a method that improves on existing global optimization techniques to tracking articulated objects. Our method improves on the state-of-the-art Annealed Particle Filter (APF) by reusing samples across annealing layers and by using an adaptive parametric density for diffusion. We compare the proposed method with APF on a scalable problem and study how the two methods scale with the dimensionality, multi-modality and the range of search. Then we perform …
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Siemens Healthineers（西门子医疗）
Registering CT images of the chest is a crucial step for several tasks such as disease progression tracking or surgical planning. It is also a challenging step because of the heterogeneous content of the human abdomen which implies complex deformations. In this work, we focus on accurately registering a subset of organs of interest. We register organ surface point clouds, as may typically be extracted from an automatic segmentation pipeline, by expanding the Bayesian Coherent Point Drift algorithm (BCPD). We introduce MO-BCPD, a multi-organ version of the BCPD algorithm which explicitly models…
Part Segmentation and Motion Estimation for Articulated Objects with Dynamic 3D Gaussians
Department of Computer Science University of Minnesota Minnesota, USA（计算机科学系 明尼苏达大学）；Department of Computer Science The University of Texas at Austin Texas, USA（计算机科学系 德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Many functional elements of human homes and workplaces consist of rigid components which are connected through one or more sliding or rotating linkages. Examples include doors and drawers of cabinets and appliances; laptops; and swivel office chairs. A robotic mobile manipulator would benefit from the ability to acquire kinematic models of such objects from observation. This paper describes a method by which a robot can acquire an object model by capturing depth imagery of the object as a human moves it through its range of motion. We envision that in future, a machine newly introduced to an e…
Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心机器人与机电一体化研究所）；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）
Kinematic structures are very common in the real world. They range from simple articulated objects to complex mechanical systems. However, despite their relevance, most model-based 3D tracking methods only consider rigid objects. To overcome this limitation, we propose a flexible framework that allows the extension of existing 6DoF algorithms to kinematic structures. Our approach focuses on methods that employ Newton-like optimization techniques, which are widely used in object tracking. The framework considers both tree-like and closed kinematic structures and allows a flexible configuration …
SynthVerse: A Large-Scale Diverse Synthetic Dataset for Point Tracking
University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Durham University（杜伦大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Duke Kunshan University（杜克昆山大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西安交通大学利物浦大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）
The challenge of markerless human motion tracking is the high dimensionality of the search space. Thus, efficient exploration in the search space is of great significance. In this paper, a motion capturing algorithm is proposed for upper body motion tracking. The proposed system tracks human motion based on monocular silhouette-matching, and it is built on the top of a hierarchical particle filter, within which a novel deterministic resampling strategy (DRS) is applied. The proposed system is evaluated quantitatively with the ground truth data measured by an inertial sensor system. In addition…
Tracking the full skeletal pose of the hands and fingers is a challenging problem that has a plethora of applications for user interaction. Existing techniques either require wearable hardware, add restrictions to user pose, or require significant computation resources. This research explores a new approach to tracking hands, or any articulated model, by using an augmented rigid body simulation. This allows us to phrase 3D object tracking as a linear complementarity problem with a well-defined solution. Based on a depth sensor's samples, the system generates constraints that limit motion ortho…
Fraunhofer IOSB（弗劳恩霍夫光电、系统技术与图像利用研究所）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
This paper proposes a novel method for geo-tracking, i.e. continuous metric self-localization in outdoor environments by registering a vehicle's sensor information with aerial imagery of an unseen target region. Geo-tracking methods offer the potential to supplant noisy signals from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) and expensive and hard to maintain prior maps that are typically used for this purpose. The proposed geo-tracking method aligns data from on-board cameras and lidar sensors with geo-registered orthophotos to continuously localize a vehicle. We train a model in a metric lea…
In this paper, we address the problem of exact recovery condition in retrieving 3D human motion from 2D landmark motion. We use a skeletal kinematic model to represent the 3D human motion as a vector of angular articulation motion. We address this problem based on the observation that at high tracking rate, regardless of the global rigid motion, only few angular articulations have non-zero motion. We propose a first ideal formulation with $\ell_0$-norm to minimize the cardinal of non-zero angular articulation motion given an equality constraint on the time-differentiation of the reprojection e…
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Hand motion capture is a popular research field, recently gaining more attention due to the ubiquity of RGB-D sensors. However, even most recent approaches focus on the case of a single isolated hand. In this work, we focus on hands that interact with other hands or objects and present a framework that successfully captures motion in such interaction scenarios for both rigid and articulated objects. Our framework combines a generative model with discriminatively trained salient points to achieve a low tracking error and with collision detection and physics simulation to achieve physically plau…
