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48 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2017

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A Generative Model of People in Clothing

Lassner, C., Pons-Moll, G., Gehler, P. V.

In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, October 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We present the first image-based generative model of people in clothing in a full-body setting. We sidestep the commonly used complex graphics rendering pipeline and the need for high-quality 3D scans of dressed people. Instead, we learn generative models from a large image database. The main challenge is to cope with the high variance in human pose, shape and appearance. For this reason, pure image-based approaches have not been considered so far. We show that this challenge can be overcome by splitting the generating process in two parts. First, we learn to generate a semantic segmentation of the body and clothing. Second, we learn a conditional model on the resulting segments that creates realistic images. The full model is differentiable and can be conditioned on pose, shape or color. The result are samples of people in different clothing items and styles. The proposed model can generate entirely new people with realistic clothing. In several experiments we present encouraging results that suggest an entirely data-driven approach to people generation is possible.

link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

2017

Lassner, C., Pons-Moll, G., Gehler, P. V. A Generative Model of People in Clothing In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, October 2017 (inproceedings)

link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

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Semantic Video CNNs through Representation Warping

Gadde, R., Jampani, V., Gehler, P. V.

In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, October 2017 (inproceedings) Accepted

Abstract
In this work, we propose a technique to convert CNN models for semantic segmentation of static images into CNNs for video data. We describe a warping method that can be used to augment existing architectures with very lit- tle extra computational cost. This module is called Net- Warp and we demonstrate its use for a range of network architectures. The main design principle is to use optical flow of adjacent frames for warping internal network repre- sentations across time. A key insight of this work is that fast optical flow methods can be combined with many different CNN architectures for improved performance and end-to- end training. Experiments validate that the proposed ap- proach incurs only little extra computational cost, while im- proving performance, when video streams are available. We achieve new state-of-the-art results on the standard CamVid and Cityscapes benchmark datasets and show reliable im- provements over different baseline networks. Our code and models are available at http://segmentation.is. tue.mpg.de

pdf Supplementary Project Page [BibTex]

Gadde, R., Jampani, V., Gehler, P. V. Semantic Video CNNs through Representation Warping In Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, October 2017 (inproceedings) Accepted

pdf Supplementary Project Page [BibTex]

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Effects of animation retargeting on perceived action outcomes

Kenny, S., Mahmood, N., Honda, C., Black, M. J., Troje, N. F.

Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP’17), pages: 2:1-2:7, September 2017 (conference)

Abstract
The individual shape of the human body, including the geometry of its articulated structure and the distribution of weight over that structure, influences the kinematics of a person's movements. How sensitive is the visual system to inconsistencies between shape and motion introduced by retargeting motion from one person onto the shape of another? We used optical motion capture to record five pairs of male performers with large differences in body weight, while they pushed, lifted, and threw objects. Based on a set of 67 markers, we estimated both the kinematics of the actions as well as the performer's individual body shape. To obtain consistent and inconsistent stimuli, we created animated avatars by combining the shape and motion estimates from either a single performer or from different performers. In a virtual reality environment, observers rated the perceived weight or thrown distance of the objects. They were also asked to explicitly discriminate between consistent and hybrid stimuli. Observers were unable to accomplish the latter, but hybridization of shape and motion influenced their judgements of action outcome in systematic ways. Inconsistencies between shape and motion were assimilated into an altered perception of the action outcome.

pdf DOI [BibTex]

Kenny, S., Mahmood, N., Honda, C., Black, M. J., Troje, N. F. Effects of animation retargeting on perceived action outcomes Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP’17), pages: 2:1-2:7, September 2017 (conference)

pdf DOI [BibTex]

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Coupling Adaptive Batch Sizes with Learning Rates

Balles, L., Romero, J., Hennig, P.

In Proceedings Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2017, pages: 410-419, (Editors: Gal Elidan and Kristian Kersting), Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI), August 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Mini-batch stochastic gradient descent and variants thereof have become standard for large-scale empirical risk minimization like the training of neural networks. These methods are usually used with a constant batch size chosen by simple empirical inspection. The batch size significantly influences the behavior of the stochastic optimization algorithm, though, since it determines the variance of the gradient estimates. This variance also changes over the optimization process; when using a constant batch size, stability and convergence is thus often enforced by means of a (manually tuned) decreasing learning rate schedule. We propose a practical method for dynamic batch size adaptation. It estimates the variance of the stochastic gradients and adapts the batch size to decrease the variance proportionally to the value of the objective function, removing the need for the aforementioned learning rate decrease. In contrast to recent related work, our algorithm couples the batch size to the learning rate, directly reflecting the known relationship between the two. On three image classification benchmarks, our batch size adaptation yields faster optimization convergence, while simultaneously simplifying learning rate tuning. A TensorFlow implementation is available.

Code link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

Balles, L., Romero, J., Hennig, P. Coupling Adaptive Batch Sizes with Learning Rates In Proceedings Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2017, pages: 410-419, (Editors: Gal Elidan and Kristian Kersting), Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI), August 2017 (inproceedings)

Code link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

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Joint Graph Decomposition and Node Labeling by Local Search

Levinkov, E., Uhrig, J., Tang, S., Omran, M., Insafutdinov, E., Kirillov, A., Rother, C., Brox, T., Schiele, B., Andres, B.

In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 1904-1912, IEEE, July 2017 (inproceedings)

PDF Supplementary DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Levinkov, E., Uhrig, J., Tang, S., Omran, M., Insafutdinov, E., Kirillov, A., Rother, C., Brox, T., Schiele, B., Andres, B. Joint Graph Decomposition and Node Labeling by Local Search In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 1904-1912, IEEE, July 2017 (inproceedings)

PDF Supplementary DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Dynamic FAUST: Registering Human Bodies in Motion

Bogo, F., Romero, J., Pons-Moll, G., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
While the ready availability of 3D scan data has influenced research throughout computer vision, less attention has focused on 4D data; that is 3D scans of moving nonrigid objects, captured over time. To be useful for vision research, such 4D scans need to be registered, or aligned, to a common topology. Consequently, extending mesh registration methods to 4D is important. Unfortunately, no ground-truth datasets are available for quantitative evaluation and comparison of 4D registration methods. To address this we create a novel dataset of high-resolution 4D scans of human subjects in motion, captured at 60 fps. We propose a new mesh registration method that uses both 3D geometry and texture information to register all scans in a sequence to a common reference topology. The approach exploits consistency in texture over both short and long time intervals and deals with temporal offsets between shape and texture capture. We show how using geometry alone results in significant errors in alignment when the motions are fast and non-rigid. We evaluate the accuracy of our registration and provide a dataset of 40,000 raw and aligned meshes. Dynamic FAUST extends the popular FAUST dataset to dynamic 4D data, and is available for research purposes at http://dfaust.is.tue.mpg.de.

pdf video Project Page Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Bogo, F., Romero, J., Pons-Moll, G., Black, M. J. Dynamic FAUST: Registering Human Bodies in Motion In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf video Project Page Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Learning from Synthetic Humans

Varol, G., Romero, J., Martin, X., Mahmood, N., Black, M. J., Laptev, I., Schmid, C.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Estimating human pose, shape, and motion from images and videos are fundamental challenges with many applications. Recent advances in 2D human pose estimation use large amounts of manually-labeled training data for learning convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Such data is time consuming to acquire and difficult to extend. Moreover, manual labeling of 3D pose, depth and motion is impractical. In this work we present SURREAL (Synthetic hUmans foR REAL tasks): a new large-scale dataset with synthetically-generated but realistic images of people rendered from 3D sequences of human motion capture data. We generate more than 6 million frames together with ground truth pose, depth maps, and segmentation masks. We show that CNNs trained on our synthetic dataset allow for accurate human depth estimation and human part segmentation in real RGB images. Our results and the new dataset open up new possibilities for advancing person analysis using cheap and large-scale synthetic data.

arXiv project data Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Varol, G., Romero, J., Martin, X., Mahmood, N., Black, M. J., Laptev, I., Schmid, C. Learning from Synthetic Humans In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

arXiv project data Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks

Martinez, J., Black, M. J., Romero, J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Human motion modelling is a classical problem at the intersection of graphics and computer vision, with applications spanning human-computer interaction, motion synthesis, and motion prediction for virtual and augmented reality. Following the success of deep learning methods in several computer vision tasks, recent work has focused on using deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model human motion, with the goal of learning time-dependent representations that perform tasks such as short-term motion prediction and long-term human motion synthesis. We examine recent work, with a focus on the evaluation methodologies commonly used in the literature, and show that, surprisingly, state-of-the-art performance can be achieved by a simple baseline that does not attempt to model motion at all. We investigate this result, and analyze recent RNN methods by looking at the architectures, loss functions, and training procedures used in state-of-the-art approaches. We propose three changes to the standard RNN models typically used for human motion, which result in a simple and scalable RNN architecture that obtains state-of-the-art performance on human motion prediction.

arXiv Project Page [BibTex]

Martinez, J., Black, M. J., Romero, J. On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

arXiv Project Page [BibTex]

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Slow Flow: Exploiting High-Speed Cameras for Accurate and Diverse Optical Flow Reference Data

Janai, J., Güney, F., Wulff, J., Black, M., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 1406-1416, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Existing optical flow datasets are limited in size and variability due to the difficulty of capturing dense ground truth. In this paper, we tackle this problem by tracking pixels through densely sampled space-time volumes recorded with a high-speed video camera. Our model exploits the linearity of small motions and reasons about occlusions from multiple frames. Using our technique, we are able to establish accurate reference flow fields outside the laboratory in natural environments. Besides, we show how our predictions can be used to augment the input images with realistic motion blur. We demonstrate the quality of the produced flow fields on synthetic and real-world datasets. Finally, we collect a novel challenging optical flow dataset by applying our technique on data from a high-speed camera and analyze the performance of the state-of-the-art in optical flow under various levels of motion blur.

pdf suppmat Project page Video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Janai, J., Güney, F., Wulff, J., Black, M., Geiger, A. Slow Flow: Exploiting High-Speed Cameras for Accurate and Diverse Optical Flow Reference Data In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 1406-1416, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Project page Video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Optical Flow in Mostly Rigid Scenes

Wulff, J., Sevilla-Lara, L., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 6911-6920, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
The optical flow of natural scenes is a combination of the motion of the observer and the independent motion of objects. Existing algorithms typically focus on either recovering motion and structure under the assumption of a purely static world or optical flow for general unconstrained scenes. We combine these approaches in an optical flow algorithm that estimates an explicit segmentation of moving objects from appearance and physical constraints. In static regions we take advantage of strong constraints to jointly estimate the camera motion and the 3D structure of the scene over multiple frames. This allows us to also regularize the structure instead of the motion. Our formulation uses a Plane+Parallax framework, which works even under small baselines, and reduces the motion estimation to a one-dimensional search problem, resulting in more accurate estimation. In moving regions the flow is treated as unconstrained, and computed with an existing optical flow method. The resulting Mostly-Rigid Flow (MR-Flow) method achieves state-of-the-art results on both the MPISintel and KITTI-2015 benchmarks.

pdf SupMat video code Project Page [BibTex]

Wulff, J., Sevilla-Lara, L., Black, M. J. Optical Flow in Mostly Rigid Scenes In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 6911-6920, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf SupMat video code Project Page [BibTex]

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OctNet: Learning Deep 3D Representations at High Resolutions

Riegler, G., Ulusoy, O., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We present OctNet, a representation for deep learning with sparse 3D data. In contrast to existing models, our representation enables 3D convolutional networks which are both deep and high resolution. Towards this goal, we exploit the sparsity in the input data to hierarchically partition the space using a set of unbalanced octrees where each leaf node stores a pooled feature representation. This allows to focus memory allocation and computation to the relevant dense regions and enables deeper networks without compromising resolution. We demonstrate the utility of our OctNet representation by analyzing the impact of resolution on several 3D tasks including 3D object classification, orientation estimation and point cloud labeling.

pdf suppmat Project Page Video Project Page [BibTex]

Riegler, G., Ulusoy, O., Geiger, A. OctNet: Learning Deep 3D Representations at High Resolutions In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Project Page Video Project Page [BibTex]

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Reflectance Adaptive Filtering Improves Intrinsic Image Estimation

Nestmeyer, T., Gehler, P. V.

In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 1771-1780, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pre-print DOI Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Nestmeyer, T., Gehler, P. V. Reflectance Adaptive Filtering Improves Intrinsic Image Estimation In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 1771-1780, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pre-print DOI Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Detailed, accurate, human shape estimation from clothed 3D scan sequences

Zhang, C., Pujades, S., Black, M., Pons-Moll, G.

In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, July 2017, Spotlight (inproceedings)

Abstract
We address the problem of estimating human body shape from 3D scans over time. Reliable estimation of 3D body shape is necessary for many applications including virtual try-on, health monitoring, and avatar creation for virtual reality. Scanning bodies in minimal clothing, however, presents a practical barrier to these applications. We address this problem by estimating body shape under clothing from a sequence of 3D scans. Previous methods that have exploited statistical models of body shape produce overly smooth shapes lacking personalized details. In this paper we contribute a new approach to recover not only an approximate shape of the person, but also their detailed shape. Our approach allows the estimated shape to deviate from a parametric model to fit the 3D scans. We demonstrate the method using high quality 4D data as well as sequences of visual hulls extracted from multi-view images. We also make available a new high quality 4D dataset that enables quantitative evaluation. Our method outperforms the previous state of the art, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

arxiv_preprint video dataset pdf supplemental DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Zhang, C., Pujades, S., Black, M., Pons-Moll, G. Detailed, accurate, human shape estimation from clothed 3D scan sequences In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, July 2017, Spotlight (inproceedings)

arxiv_preprint video dataset pdf supplemental DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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3D Menagerie: Modeling the 3D Shape and Pose of Animals

Zuffi, S., Kanazawa, A., Jacobs, D., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 5524-5532, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
There has been significant work on learning realistic, articulated, 3D models of the human body. In contrast, there are few such models of animals, despite many applications. The main challenge is that animals are much less cooperative than humans. The best human body models are learned from thousands of 3D scans of people in specific poses, which is infeasible with live animals. Consequently, we learn our model from a small set of 3D scans of toy figurines in arbitrary poses. We employ a novel part-based shape model to compute an initial registration to the scans. We then normalize their pose, learn a statistical shape model, and refine the registrations and the model together. In this way, we accurately align animal scans from different quadruped families with very different shapes and poses. With the registration to a common template we learn a shape space representing animals including lions, cats, dogs, horses, cows and hippos. Animal shapes can be sampled from the model, posed, animated, and fit to data. We demonstrate generalization by fitting it to images of real animals including species not seen in training.

pdf video Project Page [BibTex]

Zuffi, S., Kanazawa, A., Jacobs, D., Black, M. J. 3D Menagerie: Modeling the 3D Shape and Pose of Animals In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, pages: 5524-5532, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf video Project Page [BibTex]

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Optical Flow Estimation using a Spatial Pyramid Network

Ranjan, A., Black, M.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We learn to compute optical flow by combining a classical spatial-pyramid formulation with deep learning. This estimates large motions in a coarse-to-fine approach by warping one image of a pair at each pyramid level by the current flow estimate and computing an update to the flow. Instead of the standard minimization of an objective function at each pyramid level, we train one deep network per level to compute the flow update. Unlike the recent FlowNet approach, the networks do not need to deal with large motions; these are dealt with by the pyramid. This has several advantages. First, our Spatial Pyramid Network (SPyNet) is much simpler and 96% smaller than FlowNet in terms of model parameters. This makes it more efficient and appropriate for embedded applications. Second, since the flow at each pyramid level is small (< 1 pixel), a convolutional approach applied to pairs of warped images is appropriate. Third, unlike FlowNet, the learned convolution filters appear similar to classical spatio-temporal filters, giving insight into the method and how to improve it. Our results are more accurate than FlowNet on most standard benchmarks, suggesting a new direction of combining classical flow methods with deep learning.

pdf SupMat project/code [BibTex]

Ranjan, A., Black, M. Optical Flow Estimation using a Spatial Pyramid Network In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf SupMat project/code [BibTex]

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Multiple People Tracking by Lifted Multicut and Person Re-identification

Tang, S., Andriluka, M., Andres, B., Schiele, B.

In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 3701-3710, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Tang, S., Andriluka, M., Andres, B., Schiele, B. Multiple People Tracking by Lifted Multicut and Person Re-identification In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 3701-3710, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Video Propagation Networks

Jampani, V., Gadde, R., Gehler, P. V.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf supplementary arXiv project page code Project Page [BibTex]

Jampani, V., Gadde, R., Gehler, P. V. Video Propagation Networks In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

pdf supplementary arXiv project page code Project Page [BibTex]

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Generating Descriptions with Grounded and Co-Referenced People

Rohrbach, A., Rohrbach, M., Tang, S., Oh, S. J., Schiele, B.

In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 4196-4206, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

PDF DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Rohrbach, A., Rohrbach, M., Tang, S., Oh, S. J., Schiele, B. Generating Descriptions with Grounded and Co-Referenced People In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 4196-4206, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

PDF DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Semantic Multi-view Stereo: Jointly Estimating Objects and Voxels

Ulusoy, A. O., Black, M. J., Geiger, A.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Dense 3D reconstruction from RGB images is a highly ill-posed problem due to occlusions, textureless or reflective surfaces, as well as other challenges. We propose object-level shape priors to address these ambiguities. Towards this goal, we formulate a probabilistic model that integrates multi-view image evidence with 3D shape information from multiple objects. Inference in this model yields a dense 3D reconstruction of the scene as well as the existence and precise 3D pose of the objects in it. Our approach is able to recover fine details not captured in the input shapes while defaulting to the input models in occluded regions where image evidence is weak. Due to its probabilistic nature, the approach is able to cope with the approximate geometry of the 3D models as well as input shapes that are not present in the scene. We evaluate the approach quantitatively on several challenging indoor and outdoor datasets.

YouTube pdf suppmat Project Page [BibTex]

Ulusoy, A. O., Black, M. J., Geiger, A. Semantic Multi-view Stereo: Jointly Estimating Objects and Voxels In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

YouTube pdf suppmat Project Page [BibTex]

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Deep representation learning for human motion prediction and classification

Bütepage, J., Black, M., Kragic, D., Kjellström, H.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Generative models of 3D human motion are often restricted to a small number of activities and can therefore not generalize well to novel movements or applications. In this work we propose a deep learning framework for human motion capture data that learns a generic representation from a large corpus of motion capture data and generalizes well to new, unseen, motions. Using an encoding-decoding network that learns to predict future 3D poses from the most recent past, we extract a feature representation of human motion. Most work on deep learning for sequence prediction focuses on video and speech. Since skeletal data has a different structure, we present and evaluate different network architectures that make different assumptions about time dependencies and limb correlations. To quantify the learned features, we use the output of different layers for action classification and visualize the receptive fields of the network units. Our method outperforms the recent state of the art in skeletal motion prediction even though these use action specific training data. Our results show that deep feedforward networks, trained from a generic mocap database, can successfully be used for feature extraction from human motion data and that this representation can be used as a foundation for classification and prediction.

arXiv Project Page [BibTex]

Bütepage, J., Black, M., Kragic, D., Kjellström, H. Deep representation learning for human motion prediction and classification In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

arXiv Project Page [BibTex]

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Unite the People: Closing the Loop Between 3D and 2D Human Representations

Lassner, C., Romero, J., Kiefel, M., Bogo, F., Black, M. J., Gehler, P. V.

In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
3D models provide a common ground for different representations of human bodies. In turn, robust 2D estimation has proven to be a powerful tool to obtain 3D fits “in-the-wild”. However, depending on the level of detail, it can be hard to impossible to acquire labeled data for training 2D estimators on large scale. We propose a hybrid approach to this problem: with an extended version of the recently introduced SMPLify method, we obtain high quality 3D body model fits for multiple human pose datasets. Human annotators solely sort good and bad fits. This procedure leads to an initial dataset, UP-3D, with rich annotations. With a comprehensive set of experiments, we show how this data can be used to train discriminative models that produce results with an unprecedented level of detail: our models predict 31 segments and 91 landmark locations on the body. Using the 91 landmark pose estimator, we present state-of-the art results for 3D human pose and shape estimation using an order of magnitude less training data and without assumptions about gender or pose in the fitting procedure. We show that UP-3D can be enhanced with these improved fits to grow in quantity and quality, which makes the system deployable on large scale. The data, code and models are available for research purposes.

arXiv project/code/data Project Page [BibTex]

Lassner, C., Romero, J., Kiefel, M., Bogo, F., Black, M. J., Gehler, P. V. Unite the People: Closing the Loop Between 3D and 2D Human Representations In Proceedings IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2017, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, July 2017 (inproceedings)

arXiv project/code/data Project Page [BibTex]

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Towards Accurate Marker-less Human Shape and Pose Estimation over Time

Huang, Y., Bogo, F., Lassner, C., Kanazawa, A., Gehler, P. V., Romero, J., Akhter, I., Black, M. J.

In International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV), pages: 421-430, 2017 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Existing markerless motion capture methods often assume known backgrounds, static cameras, and sequence specific motion priors, limiting their application scenarios. Here we present a fully automatic method that, given multiview videos, estimates 3D human pose and body shape. We take the recently proposed SMPLify method [12] as the base method and extend it in several ways. First we fit a 3D human body model to 2D features detected in multi-view images. Second, we use a CNN method to segment the person in each image and fit the 3D body model to the contours, further improving accuracy. Third we utilize a generic and robust DCT temporal prior to handle the left and right side swapping issue sometimes introduced by the 2D pose estimator. Validation on standard benchmarks shows our results are comparable to the state of the art and also provide a realistic 3D shape avatar. We also demonstrate accurate results on HumanEva and on challenging monocular sequences of dancing from YouTube.

Code pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

2016

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Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image

Bogo, F., Kanazawa, A., Lassner, C., Gehler, P., Romero, J., Black, M. J.

In Computer Vision – ECCV 2016, pages: 561-578, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer International Publishing, October 2016 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We describe the first method to automatically estimate the 3D pose of the human body as well as its 3D shape from a single unconstrained image. We estimate a full 3D mesh and show that 2D joints alone carry a surprising amount of information about body shape. The problem is challenging because of the complexity of the human body, articulation, occlusion, clothing, lighting, and the inherent ambiguity in inferring 3D from 2D. To solve this, we fi rst use a recently published CNN-based method, DeepCut, to predict (bottom-up) the 2D body joint locations. We then fit (top-down) a recently published statistical body shape model, called SMPL, to the 2D joints. We do so by minimizing an objective function that penalizes the error between the projected 3D model joints and detected 2D joints. Because SMPL captures correlations in human shape across the population, we are able to robustly fi t it to very little data. We further leverage the 3D model to prevent solutions that cause interpenetration. We evaluate our method, SMPLify, on the Leeds Sports, HumanEva, and Human3.6M datasets, showing superior pose accuracy with respect to the state of the art.

pdf Video Sup Mat video Code Project Project Page [BibTex]

2016

Bogo, F., Kanazawa, A., Lassner, C., Gehler, P., Romero, J., Black, M. J. Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image In Computer Vision – ECCV 2016, pages: 561-578, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer International Publishing, October 2016 (inproceedings)

pdf Video Sup Mat video Code Project Project Page [BibTex]

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Superpixel Convolutional Networks using Bilateral Inceptions

Gadde, R., Jampani, V., Kiefel, M., Kappler, D., Gehler, P.

In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, October 2016 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In this paper we propose a CNN architecture for semantic image segmentation. We introduce a new “bilateral inception” module that can be inserted in existing CNN architectures and performs bilateral filtering, at multiple feature-scales, between superpixels in an image. The feature spaces for bilateral filtering and other parameters of the module are learned end-to-end using standard backpropagation techniques. The bilateral inception module addresses two issues that arise with general CNN segmentation architectures. First, this module propagates information between (super) pixels while respecting image edges, thus using the structured information of the problem for improved results. Second, the layer recovers a full resolution segmentation result from the lower resolution solution of a CNN. In the experiments, we modify several existing CNN architectures by inserting our inception modules between the last CNN (1 × 1 convolution) layers. Empirical results on three different datasets show reliable improvements not only in comparison to the baseline networks, but also in comparison to several dense-pixel prediction techniques such as CRFs, while being competitive in time.

pdf supplementary poster Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Gadde, R., Jampani, V., Kiefel, M., Kappler, D., Gehler, P. Superpixel Convolutional Networks using Bilateral Inceptions In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, October 2016 (inproceedings)

pdf supplementary poster Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Barrista - Caffe Well-Served

Lassner, C., Kappler, D., Kiefel, M., Gehler, P.

In ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition, October 2016 (inproceedings)

Abstract
The caffe framework is one of the leading deep learning toolboxes in the machine learning and computer vision community. While it offers efficiency and configurability, it falls short of a full interface to Python. With increasingly involved procedures for training deep networks and reaching depths of hundreds of layers, creating configuration files and keeping them consistent becomes an error prone process. We introduce the barrista framework, offering full, pythonic control over caffe. It separates responsibilities and offers code to solve frequently occurring tasks for pre-processing, training and model inspection. It is compatible to all caffe versions since mid 2015 and can import and export .prototxt files. Examples are included, e.g., a deep residual network implemented in only 172 lines (for arbitrary depths), comparing to 2320 lines in the official implementation for the equivalent model.

pdf link (url) DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Lassner, C., Kappler, D., Kiefel, M., Gehler, P. Barrista - Caffe Well-Served In ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition, October 2016 (inproceedings)

pdf link (url) DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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DeepCut: Joint Subset Partition and Labeling for Multi Person Pose Estimation

Pishchulin, L., Insafutdinov, E., Tang, S., Andres, B., Andriluka, M., Gehler, P., Schiele, B.

In 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 4929-4937, IEEE, June 2016 (inproceedings)

Abstract
This paper considers the task of articulated human pose estimation of multiple people in real-world images. We propose an approach that jointly solves the tasks of detection and pose estimation: it infers the number of persons in a scene, identifies occluded body parts, and disambiguates body parts between people in close proximity of each other. This joint formulation is in contrast to previous strategies, that address the problem by first detecting people and subsequently estimating their body pose. We propose a partitioning and labeling formulation of a set of body-part hypotheses generated with CNN-based part detectors. Our formulation, an instance of an integer linear program, implicitly performs non-maximum suppression on the set of part candidates and groups them to form configurations of body parts respecting geometric and appearance constraints. Experiments on four different datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art results for both single person and multi person pose estimation.

code pdf supplementary DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Pishchulin, L., Insafutdinov, E., Tang, S., Andres, B., Andriluka, M., Gehler, P., Schiele, B. DeepCut: Joint Subset Partition and Labeling for Multi Person Pose Estimation In 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 4929-4937, IEEE, June 2016 (inproceedings)

code pdf supplementary DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Video segmentation via object flow

Tsai, Y., Yang, M., Black, M. J.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2016 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Video object segmentation is challenging due to fast moving objects, deforming shapes, and cluttered backgrounds. Optical flow can be used to propagate an object segmentation over time but, unfortunately, flow is often inaccurate, particularly around object boundaries. Such boundaries are precisely where we want our segmentation to be accurate. To obtain accurate segmentation across time, we propose an efficient algorithm that considers video segmentation and optical flow estimation simultaneously. For video segmentation, we formulate a principled, multiscale, spatio-temporal objective function that uses optical flow to propagate information between frames. For optical flow estimation, particularly at object boundaries, we compute the flow independently in the segmented regions and recompose the results. We call the process object flow and demonstrate the effectiveness of jointly optimizing optical flow and video segmentation using an iterative scheme. Experiments on the SegTrack v2 and Youtube-Objects datasets show that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the other state-of-the-art methods.

pdf [BibTex]

Tsai, Y., Yang, M., Black, M. J. Video segmentation via object flow In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2016 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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Patches, Planes and Probabilities: A Non-local Prior for Volumetric 3D Reconstruction

Ulusoy, A. O., Black, M. J., Geiger, A.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2016 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In this paper, we propose a non-local structured prior for volumetric multi-view 3D reconstruction. Towards this goal, we present a novel Markov random field model based on ray potentials in which assumptions about large 3D surface patches such as planarity or Manhattan world constraints can be efficiently encoded as probabilistic priors. We further derive an inference algorithm that reasons jointly about voxels, pixels and image segments, and estimates marginal distributions of appearance, occupancy, depth, normals and planarity. Key to tractable inference is a novel hybrid representation that spans both voxel and pixel space and that integrates non-local information from 2D image segmentations in a principled way. We compare our non-local prior to commonly employed local smoothness assumptions and a variety of state-of-the-art volumetric reconstruction baselines on challenging outdoor scenes with textureless and reflective surfaces. Our experiments indicate that regularizing over larger distances has the potential to resolve ambiguities where local regularizers fail.

YouTube pdf poster suppmat Project Page [BibTex]

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Optical Flow with Semantic Segmentation and Localized Layers

Sevilla-Lara, L., Sun, D., Jampani, V., Black, M. J.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 3889-3898, June 2016 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Existing optical flow methods make generic, spatially homogeneous, assumptions about the spatial structure of the flow. In reality, optical flow varies across an image depending on object class. Simply put, different objects move differently. Here we exploit recent advances in static semantic scene segmentation to segment the image into objects of different types. We define different models of image motion in these regions depending on the type of object. For example, we model the motion on roads with homographies, vegetation with spatially smooth flow, and independently moving objects like cars and planes with affine motion plus deviations. We then pose the flow estimation problem using a novel formulation of localized layers, which addresses limitations of traditional layered models for dealing with complex scene motion. Our semantic flow method achieves the lowest error of any published monocular method in the KITTI-2015 flow benchmark and produces qualitatively better flow and segmentation than recent top methods on a wide range of natural videos.

video Kitti Precomputed Data (1.6GB) pdf YouTube Sequences Code Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Learning Sparse High Dimensional Filters: Image Filtering, Dense CRFs and Bilateral Neural Networks

Jampani, V., Kiefel, M., Gehler, P. V.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 4452-4461, June 2016 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Bilateral filters have wide spread use due to their edge-preserving properties. The common use case is to manually choose a parametric filter type, usually a Gaussian filter. In this paper, we will generalize the parametrization and in particular derive a gradient descent algorithm so the filter parameters can be learned from data. This derivation allows to learn high dimensional linear filters that operate in sparsely populated feature spaces. We build on the permutohedral lattice construction for efficient filtering. The ability to learn more general forms of high-dimensional filters can be used in several diverse applications. First, we demonstrate the use in applications where single filter applications are desired for runtime reasons. Further, we show how this algorithm can be used to learn the pairwise potentials in densely connected conditional random fields and apply these to different image segmentation tasks. Finally, we introduce layers of bilateral filters in CNNs and propose bilateral neural networks for the use of high-dimensional sparse data. This view provides new ways to encode model structure into network architectures. A diverse set of experiments empirically validates the usage of general forms of filters.

project page code CVF open-access pdf supplementary poster Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Occlusion boundary detection via deep exploration of context

Fu, H., Wang, C., Tao, D., Black, M. J.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2016 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Occlusion boundaries contain rich perceptual information about the underlying scene structure. They also provide important cues in many visual perception tasks such as scene understanding, object recognition, and segmentation. In this paper, we improve occlusion boundary detection via enhanced exploration of contextual information (e.g., local structural boundary patterns, observations from surrounding regions, and temporal context), and in doing so develop a novel approach based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and conditional random fields (CRFs). Experimental results demonstrate that our detector significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art (e.g., improving the F-measure from 0.62 to 0.71 on the commonly used CMU benchmark). Last but not least, we empirically assess the roles of several important components of the proposed detector, so as to validate the rationale behind this approach.

pdf [BibTex]

Fu, H., Wang, C., Tao, D., Black, M. J. Occlusion boundary detection via deep exploration of context In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2016 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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Semantic Instance Annotation of Street Scenes by 3D to 2D Label Transfer

Xie, J., Kiefel, M., Sun, M., Geiger, A.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2016 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Semantic annotations are vital for training models for object recognition, semantic segmentation or scene understanding. Unfortunately, pixelwise annotation of images at very large scale is labor-intensive and only little labeled data is available, particularly at instance level and for street scenes. In this paper, we propose to tackle this problem by lifting the semantic instance labeling task from 2D into 3D. Given reconstructions from stereo or laser data, we annotate static 3D scene elements with rough bounding primitives and develop a probabilistic model which transfers this information into the image domain. We leverage our method to obtain 2D labels for a novel suburban video dataset which we have collected, resulting in 400k semantic and instance image annotations. A comparison of our method to state-of-the-art label transfer baselines reveals that 3D information enables more efficient annotation while at the same time resulting in improved accuracy and time-coherent labels.

pdf suppmat Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Xie, J., Kiefel, M., Sun, M., Geiger, A. Semantic Instance Annotation of Street Scenes by 3D to 2D Label Transfer In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2016 (inproceedings)

pdf suppmat Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Appealing female avatars from 3D body scans: Perceptual effects of stylization

Fleming, R., Mohler, B., Romero, J., Black, M. J., Breidt, M.

In 11th Int. Conf. on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (GRAPP), Febuary 2016 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Advances in 3D scanning technology allow us to create realistic virtual avatars from full body 3D scan data. However, negative reactions to some realistic computer generated humans suggest that this approach might not always provide the most appealing results. Using styles derived from existing popular character designs, we present a novel automatic stylization technique for body shape and colour information based on a statistical 3D model of human bodies. We investigate whether such stylized body shapes result in increased perceived appeal with two different experiments: One focuses on body shape alone, the other investigates the additional role of surface colour and lighting. Our results consistently show that the most appealing avatar is a partially stylized one. Importantly, avatars with high stylization or no stylization at all were rated to have the least appeal. The inclusion of colour information and improvements to render quality had no significant effect on the overall perceived appeal of the avatars, and we observe that the body shape primarily drives the change in appeal ratings. For body scans with colour information, we found that a partially stylized avatar was most effective, increasing average appeal ratings by approximately 34%.

pdf Project Page [BibTex]

Fleming, R., Mohler, B., Romero, J., Black, M. J., Breidt, M. Appealing female avatars from 3D body scans: Perceptual effects of stylization In 11th Int. Conf. on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (GRAPP), Febuary 2016 (inproceedings)

pdf Project Page [BibTex]

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Deep Discrete Flow

Güney, F., Geiger, A.

Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2016 (conference) Accepted

pdf suppmat Project Page [BibTex]

Güney, F., Geiger, A. Deep Discrete Flow Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2016 (conference) Accepted

pdf suppmat Project Page [BibTex]

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Reconstructing Articulated Rigged Models from RGB-D Videos

Tzionas, D., Gall, J.

In European Conference on Computer Vision Workshops 2016 (ECCVW’16) - Workshop on Recovering 6D Object Pose (R6D’16), pages: 620-633, Springer International Publishing, 2016 (inproceedings)

Abstract
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 consists of a watertight mesh, embedded skeleton, and skinning weights.

pdf suppl Project's Website YouTube link (url) DOI [BibTex]

Tzionas, D., Gall, J. Reconstructing Articulated Rigged Models from RGB-D Videos In European Conference on Computer Vision Workshops 2016 (ECCVW’16) - Workshop on Recovering 6D Object Pose (R6D’16), pages: 620-633, Springer International Publishing, 2016 (inproceedings)

pdf suppl Project's Website YouTube link (url) DOI [BibTex]

2013

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Strong Appearance and Expressive Spatial Models for Human Pose Estimation

Pishchulin, L., Andriluka, M., Gehler, P., Schiele, B.

In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 3487 - 3494 , IEEE, December 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Typical approaches to articulated pose estimation combine spatial modelling of the human body with appearance modelling of body parts. This paper aims to push the state-of-the-art in articulated pose estimation in two ways. First we explore various types of appearance representations aiming to substantially improve the body part hypotheses. And second, we draw on and combine several recently proposed powerful ideas such as more flexible spatial models as well as image-conditioned spatial models. In a series of experiments we draw several important conclusions: (1) we show that the proposed appearance representations are complementary; (2) we demonstrate that even a basic tree-structure spatial human body model achieves state-of-the-art performance when augmented with the proper appearance representation; and (3) we show that the combination of the best performing appearance model with a flexible image-conditioned spatial model achieves the best result, significantly improving over the state of the art, on the "Leeds Sports Poses'' and "Parse'' benchmarks.

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

2013

Pishchulin, L., Andriluka, M., Gehler, P., Schiele, B. Strong Appearance and Expressive Spatial Models for Human Pose Estimation In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 3487 - 3494 , IEEE, December 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Understanding High-Level Semantics by Modeling Traffic Patterns

Zhang, H., Geiger, A., Urtasun, R.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, pages: 3056-3063, Sydney, Australia, December 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In this paper, we are interested in understanding the semantics of outdoor scenes in the context of autonomous driving. Towards this goal, we propose a generative model of 3D urban scenes which is able to reason not only about the geometry and objects present in the scene, but also about the high-level semantics in the form of traffic patterns. We found that a small number of patterns is sufficient to model the vast majority of traffic scenes and show how these patterns can be learned. As evidenced by our experiments, this high-level reasoning significantly improves the overall scene estimation as well as the vehicle-to-lane association when compared to state-of-the-art approaches. All data and code will be made available upon publication.

pdf [BibTex]

Zhang, H., Geiger, A., Urtasun, R. Understanding High-Level Semantics by Modeling Traffic Patterns In International Conference on Computer Vision, pages: 3056-3063, Sydney, Australia, December 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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A Non-parametric Bayesian Network Prior of Human Pose

Lehrmann, A. M., Gehler, P., Nowozin, S.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 1281-1288, December 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Having a sensible prior of human pose is a vital ingredient for many computer vision applications, including tracking and pose estimation. While the application of global non-parametric approaches and parametric models has led to some success, finding the right balance in terms of flexibility and tractability, as well as estimating model parameters from data has turned out to be challenging. In this work, we introduce a sparse Bayesian network model of human pose that is non-parametric with respect to the estimation of both its graph structure and its local distributions. We describe an efficient sampling scheme for our model and show its tractability for the computation of exact log-likelihoods. We empirically validate our approach on the Human 3.6M dataset and demonstrate superior performance to global models and parametric networks. We further illustrate our model's ability to represent and compose poses not present in the training set (compositionality) and describe a speed-accuracy trade-off that allows realtime scoring of poses.

Project page pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Lehrmann, A. M., Gehler, P., Nowozin, S. A Non-parametric Bayesian Network Prior of Human Pose In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 1281-1288, December 2013 (inproceedings)

Project page pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Towards understanding action recognition

Jhuang, H., Gall, J., Zuffi, S., Schmid, C., Black, M. J.

In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 3192-3199, IEEE, Sydney, Australia, December 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Although action recognition in videos is widely studied, current methods often fail on real-world datasets. Many recent approaches improve accuracy and robustness to cope with challenging video sequences, but it is often unclear what affects the results most. This paper attempts to provide insights based on a systematic performance evaluation using thoroughly-annotated data of human actions. We annotate human Joints for the HMDB dataset (J-HMDB). This annotation can be used to derive ground truth optical flow and segmentation. We evaluate current methods using this dataset and systematically replace the output of various algorithms with ground truth. This enables us to discover what is important – for example, should we work on improving flow algorithms, estimating human bounding boxes, or enabling pose estimation? In summary, we find that highlevel pose features greatly outperform low/mid level features; in particular, pose over time is critical, but current pose estimation algorithms are not yet reliable enough to provide this information. We also find that the accuracy of a top-performing action recognition framework can be greatly increased by refining the underlying low/mid level features; this suggests it is important to improve optical flow and human detection algorithms. Our analysis and JHMDB dataset should facilitate a deeper understanding of action recognition algorithms.

Website Errata Poster Paper Slides DOI Project Page Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Jhuang, H., Gall, J., Zuffi, S., Schmid, C., Black, M. J. Towards understanding action recognition In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 3192-3199, IEEE, Sydney, Australia, December 2013 (inproceedings)

Website Errata Poster Paper Slides DOI Project Page Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Mixing Decoded Cursor Velocity and Position from an Offline Kalman Filter Improves Cursor Control in People with Tetraplegia

Homer, M., Harrison, M., Black, M. J., Perge, J., Cash, S., Friehs, G., Hochberg, L.

In 6th International IEEE EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering, pages: 715-718, San Diego, November 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Kalman filtering is a common method to decode neural signals from the motor cortex. In clinical research investigating the use of intracortical brain computer interfaces (iBCIs), the technique enabled people with tetraplegia to control assistive devices such as a computer or robotic arm directly from their neural activity. For reaching movements, the Kalman filter typically estimates the instantaneous endpoint velocity of the control device. Here, we analyzed attempted arm/hand movements by people with tetraplegia to control a cursor on a computer screen to reach several circular targets. A standard velocity Kalman filter is enhanced to additionally decode for the cursor’s position. We then mix decoded velocity and position to generate cursor movement commands. We analyzed data, offline, from two participants across six sessions. Root mean squared error between the actual and estimated cursor trajectory improved by 12.2 ±10.5% (pairwise t-test, p<0.05) as compared to a standard velocity Kalman filter. The findings suggest that simultaneously decoding for intended velocity and position and using them both to generate movement commands can improve the performance of iBCIs.

pdf Project Page [BibTex]

Homer, M., Harrison, M., Black, M. J., Perge, J., Cash, S., Friehs, G., Hochberg, L. Mixing Decoded Cursor Velocity and Position from an Offline Kalman Filter Improves Cursor Control in People with Tetraplegia In 6th International IEEE EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering, pages: 715-718, San Diego, November 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf Project Page [BibTex]

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Poselet conditioned pictorial structures

Pishchulin, L., Andriluka, M., Gehler, P., Schiele, B.

In IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages: 588 - 595, IEEE, Portland, OR, June 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Pishchulin, L., Andriluka, M., Gehler, P., Schiele, B. Poselet conditioned pictorial structures In IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages: 588 - 595, IEEE, Portland, OR, June 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Occlusion Patterns for Object Class Detection

Pepik, B., Stark, M., Gehler, P., Schiele, B.

In IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Portland, OR, June 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Despite the success of recent object class recognition systems, the long-standing problem of partial occlusion re- mains a major challenge, and a principled solution is yet to be found. In this paper we leave the beaten path of meth- ods that treat occlusion as just another source of noise – instead, we include the occluder itself into the modelling, by mining distinctive, reoccurring occlusion patterns from annotated training data. These patterns are then used as training data for dedicated detectors of varying sophistica- tion. In particular, we evaluate and compare models that range from standard object class detectors to hierarchical, part-based representations of occluder/occludee pairs. In an extensive evaluation we derive insights that can aid fur- ther developments in tackling the occlusion challenge.

pdf Project Page [BibTex]

Pepik, B., Stark, M., Gehler, P., Schiele, B. Occlusion Patterns for Object Class Detection In IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Portland, OR, June 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf Project Page [BibTex]

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Lost! Leveraging the Crowd for Probabilistic Visual Self-Localization

(CVPR13 Best Paper Runner-Up)

Brubaker, M. A., Geiger, A., Urtasun, R.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2013), pages: 3057-3064, IEEE, Portland, OR, June 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In this paper we propose an affordable solution to self- localization, which utilizes visual odometry and road maps as the only inputs. To this end, we present a probabilis- tic model as well as an efficient approximate inference al- gorithm, which is able to utilize distributed computation to meet the real-time requirements of autonomous systems. Because of the probabilistic nature of the model we are able to cope with uncertainty due to noisy visual odometry and inherent ambiguities in the map ( e.g ., in a Manhattan world). By exploiting freely available, community devel- oped maps and visual odometry measurements, we are able to localize a vehicle up to 3m after only a few seconds of driving on maps which contain more than 2,150km of driv- able roads.

pdf supplementary project page [BibTex]

Brubaker, M. A., Geiger, A., Urtasun, R. Lost! Leveraging the Crowd for Probabilistic Visual Self-Localization In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2013), pages: 3057-3064, IEEE, Portland, OR, June 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf supplementary project page [BibTex]

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Human Pose Estimation using Body Parts Dependent Joint Regressors

Dantone, M., Gall, J., Leistner, C., van Gool, L.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 3041-3048, IEEE, Portland, OR, USA, June 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In this work, we address the problem of estimating 2d human pose from still images. Recent methods that rely on discriminatively trained deformable parts organized in a tree model have shown to be very successful in solving this task. Within such a pictorial structure framework, we address the problem of obtaining good part templates by proposing novel, non-linear joint regressors. In particular, we employ two-layered random forests as joint regressors. The first layer acts as a discriminative, independent body part classifier. The second layer takes the estimated class distributions of the first one into account and is thereby able to predict joint locations by modeling the interdependence and co-occurrence of the parts. This results in a pose estimation framework that takes dependencies between body parts already for joint localization into account and is thus able to circumvent typical ambiguities of tree structures, such as for legs and arms. In the experiments, we demonstrate that our body parts dependent joint regressors achieve a higher joint localization accuracy than tree-based state-of-the-art methods.

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Dantone, M., Gall, J., Leistner, C., van Gool, L. Human Pose Estimation using Body Parts Dependent Joint Regressors In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pages: 3041-3048, IEEE, Portland, OR, USA, June 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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A fully-connected layered model of foreground and background flow

Sun, D., Wulff, J., Sudderth, E., Pfister, H., Black, M.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, (CVPR 2013), pages: 2451-2458, Portland, OR, June 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Layered models allow scene segmentation and motion estimation to be formulated together and to inform one another. Traditional layered motion methods, however, employ fairly weak models of scene structure, relying on locally connected Ising/Potts models which have limited ability to capture long-range correlations in natural scenes. To address this, we formulate a fully-connected layered model that enables global reasoning about the complicated segmentations of real objects. Optimization with fully-connected graphical models is challenging, and our inference algorithm leverages recent work on efficient mean field updates for fully-connected conditional random fields. These methods can be implemented efficiently using high-dimensional Gaussian filtering. We combine these ideas with a layered flow model, and find that the long-range connections greatly improve segmentation into figure-ground layers when compared with locally connected MRF models. Experiments on several benchmark datasets show that the method can recover fine structures and large occlusion regions, with good flow accuracy and much lower computational cost than previous locally-connected layered models.

pdf Supplemental Material Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Sun, D., Wulff, J., Sudderth, E., Pfister, H., Black, M. A fully-connected layered model of foreground and background flow In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, (CVPR 2013), pages: 2451-2458, Portland, OR, June 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf Supplemental Material Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Estimating Human Pose with Flowing Puppets

Zuffi, S., Romero, J., Schmid, C., Black, M. J.

In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 3312-3319, 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We address the problem of upper-body human pose estimation in uncontrolled monocular video sequences, without manual initialization. Most current methods focus on isolated video frames and often fail to correctly localize arms and hands. Inferring pose over a video sequence is advantageous because poses of people in adjacent frames exhibit properties of smooth variation due to the nature of human and camera motion. To exploit this, previous methods have used prior knowledge about distinctive actions or generic temporal priors combined with static image likelihoods to track people in motion. Here we take a different approach based on a simple observation: Information about how a person moves from frame to frame is present in the optical flow field. We develop an approach for tracking articulated motions that "links" articulated shape models of people in adjacent frames trough the dense optical flow. Key to this approach is a 2D shape model of the body that we use to compute how the body moves over time. The resulting "flowing puppets" provide a way of integrating image evidence across frames to improve pose inference. We apply our method on a challenging dataset of TV video sequences and show state-of-the-art performance.

pdf code data DOI Project Page Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Zuffi, S., Romero, J., Schmid, C., Black, M. J. Estimating Human Pose with Flowing Puppets In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 3312-3319, 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf code data DOI Project Page Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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A Comparison of Directional Distances for Hand Pose Estimation

Tzionas, D., Gall, J.

In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), 8142, pages: 131-141, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: Weickert, Joachim and Hein, Matthias and Schiele, Bernt), Springer, 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Benchmarking methods for 3d hand tracking is still an open problem due to the difficulty of acquiring ground truth data. We introduce a new dataset and benchmarking protocol that is insensitive to the accumulative error of other protocols. To this end, we create testing frame pairs of increasing difficulty and measure the pose estimation error separately for each of them. This approach gives new insights and allows to accurately study the performance of each feature or method without employing a full tracking pipeline. Following this protocol, we evaluate various directional distances in the context of silhouette-based 3d hand tracking, expressed as special cases of a generalized Chamfer distance form. An appropriate parameter setup is proposed for each of them, and a comparative study reveals the best performing method in this context.

pdf Supplementary Project Page link (url) DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Tzionas, D., Gall, J. A Comparison of Directional Distances for Hand Pose Estimation In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), 8142, pages: 131-141, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, (Editors: Weickert, Joachim and Hein, Matthias and Schiele, Bernt), Springer, 2013 (inproceedings)

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A Generic Deformation Model for Dense Non-Rigid Surface Registration: a Higher-Order MRF-based Approach

Zeng, Y., Wang, C., Gu, X., Samaras, D., Paragios, N.

In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 3360~3367, 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Zeng, Y., Wang, C., Gu, X., Samaras, D., Paragios, N. A Generic Deformation Model for Dense Non-Rigid Surface Registration: a Higher-Order MRF-based Approach In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 3360~3367, 2013 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]