Header logo is ps

38 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2019

Thumb xl celia
Decoding subcategories of human bodies from both body- and face-responsive cortical regions

Foster, C., Zhao, M., Romero, J., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J., Bartels, A., Bülthoff, I.

NeuroImage, 202(15):116085, November 2019 (article)

Abstract
Our visual system can easily categorize objects (e.g. faces vs. bodies) and further differentiate them into subcategories (e.g. male vs. female). This ability is particularly important for objects of social significance, such as human faces and bodies. While many studies have demonstrated category selectivity to faces and bodies in the brain, how subcategories of faces and bodies are represented remains unclear. Here, we investigated how the brain encodes two prominent subcategories shared by both faces and bodies, sex and weight, and whether neural responses to these subcategories rely on low-level visual, high-level visual or semantic similarity. We recorded brain activity with fMRI while participants viewed faces and bodies that varied in sex, weight, and image size. The results showed that the sex of bodies can be decoded from both body- and face-responsive brain areas, with the former exhibiting more consistent size-invariant decoding than the latter. Body weight could also be decoded in face-responsive areas and in distributed body-responsive areas, and this decoding was also invariant to image size. The weight of faces could be decoded from the fusiform body area (FBA), and weight could be decoded across face and body stimuli in the extrastriate body area (EBA) and a distributed body-responsive area. The sex of well-controlled faces (e.g. excluding hairstyles) could not be decoded from face- or body-responsive regions. These results demonstrate that both face- and body-responsive brain regions encode information that can distinguish the sex and weight of bodies. Moreover, the neural patterns corresponding to sex and weight were invariant to image size and could sometimes generalize across face and body stimuli, suggesting that such subcategorical information is encoded with a high-level visual or semantic code.

paper pdf DOI [BibTex]

2019

Foster, C., Zhao, M., Romero, J., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J., Bartels, A., Bülthoff, I. Decoding subcategories of human bodies from both body- and face-responsive cortical regions NeuroImage, 202(15):116085, November 2019 (article)

paper pdf DOI [BibTex]

Thumb xl multihumanoflow thumb
Learning Multi-Human Optical Flow

Ranjan, A., Hoffmann, D. T., Tzionas, D., Tang, S., Romero, J., Black, M. J.

arxiv preprint arXiv:1910.1166, November 2019 (article)

Abstract
The optical flow of humans is well known to be useful for the analysis of human action. Recent optical flow methods focus on training deep networks to approach the problem. However, the training data used by them does not cover the domain of human motion. Therefore, we develop a dataset of multi-human optical flow and train optical flow networks on this dataset. We use a 3D model of the human body and motion capture data to synthesize realistic flow fields in both single-and multi-person images. We then train optical flow networks to estimate human flow fields from pairs of images. We demonstrate that our trained networks are more accurate than a wide range of top methods on held-out test data and that they can generalize well to real image sequences. The code, trained models and the dataset are available for research.

Paper poster link (url) [BibTex]

Thumb xl cover walking seq
AirCap – Aerial Outdoor Motion Capture

Ahmad, A., Price, E., Tallamraju, R., Saini, N., Lawless, G., Ludwig, R., Martinovic, I., Bülthoff, H. H., Black, M. J.

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2019), Workshop on Aerial Swarms, November 2019 (misc)

Abstract
This paper presents an overview of the Grassroots project Aerial Outdoor Motion Capture (AirCap) running at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. AirCap's goal is to achieve markerless, unconstrained, human motion capture (mocap) in unknown and unstructured outdoor environments. To that end, we have developed an autonomous flying motion capture system using a team of aerial vehicles (MAVs) with only on-board, monocular RGB cameras. We have conducted several real robot experiments involving up to 3 aerial vehicles autonomously tracking and following a person in several challenging scenarios using our approach of active cooperative perception developed in AirCap. Using the images captured by these robots during the experiments, we have demonstrated a successful offline body pose and shape estimation with sufficiently high accuracy. Overall, we have demonstrated the first fully autonomous flying motion capture system involving multiple robots for outdoor scenarios.

Talk slides Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Ahmad, A., Price, E., Tallamraju, R., Saini, N., Lawless, G., Ludwig, R., Martinovic, I., Bülthoff, H. H., Black, M. J. AirCap – Aerial Outdoor Motion Capture IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2019), Workshop on Aerial Swarms, November 2019 (misc)

Talk slides Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Thumb xl autonomous mocap cover image new
Active Perception based Formation Control for Multiple Aerial Vehicles

Tallamraju, R., Price, E., Ludwig, R., Karlapalem, K., Bülthoff, H. H., Black, M. J., Ahmad, A.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Robotics and Automation Letters, 4(4):4491-4498, IEEE, October 2019 (article)

Abstract
We present a novel robotic front-end for autonomous aerial motion-capture (mocap) in outdoor environments. In previous work, we presented an approach for cooperative detection and tracking (CDT) of a subject using multiple micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs). However, it did not ensure optimal view-point configurations of the MAVs to minimize the uncertainty in the person's cooperatively tracked 3D position estimate. In this article, we introduce an active approach for CDT. In contrast to cooperatively tracking only the 3D positions of the person, the MAVs can actively compute optimal local motion plans, resulting in optimal view-point configurations, which minimize the uncertainty in the tracked estimate. We achieve this by decoupling the goal of active tracking into a quadratic objective and non-convex constraints corresponding to angular configurations of the MAVs w.r.t. the person. We derive this decoupling using Gaussian observation model assumptions within the CDT algorithm. We preserve convexity in optimization by embedding all the non-convex constraints, including those for dynamic obstacle avoidance, as external control inputs in the MPC dynamics. Multiple real robot experiments and comparisons involving 3 MAVs in several challenging scenarios are presented.

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Tallamraju, R., Price, E., Ludwig, R., Karlapalem, K., Bülthoff, H. H., Black, M. J., Ahmad, A. Active Perception based Formation Control for Multiple Aerial Vehicles IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Robotics and Automation Letters, 4(4):4491-4498, IEEE, October 2019 (article)

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Thumb xl mosh heroes icon
Method for providing a three dimensional body model

Loper, M., Mahmood, N., Black, M.

September 2019, U.S.~Patent 10,417,818 (misc)

Abstract
A method for providing a three-dimensional body model which may be applied for an animation, based on a moving body, wherein the method comprises providing a parametric three-dimensional body model, which allows shape and pose variations; applying a standard set of body markers; optimizing the set of body markers by generating an additional set of body markers and applying the same for providing 3D coordinate marker signals for capturing shape and pose of the body and dynamics of soft tissue; and automatically providing an animation by processing the 3D coordinate marker signals in order to provide a personalized three-dimensional body model, based on estimated shape and an estimated pose of the body by means of predicted marker locations.

MoSh Project pdf [BibTex]

Thumb xl 3dmm
3D Morphable Face Models - Past, Present and Future

Egger, B., Smith, W. A. P., Tewari, A., Wuhrer, S., Zollhoefer, M., Beeler, T., Bernard, F., Bolkart, T., Kortylewski, A., Romdhani, S., Theobalt, C., Blanz, V., Vetter, T.

arxiv preprint arXiv:1909.01815, September 2019 (article)

Abstract
In this paper, we provide a detailed survey of 3D Morphable Face Models over the 20 years since they were first proposed. The challenges in building and applying these models, namely capture, modeling, image formation,and image analysis, are still active research topics, and we review the state-of-the-art in each of these areas. We also look ahead, identifying unsolved challenges, proposing directions for future research and highlighting the broad range of current and future applications.

paper project page [BibTex]

Egger, B., Smith, W. A. P., Tewari, A., Wuhrer, S., Zollhoefer, M., Beeler, T., Bernard, F., Bolkart, T., Kortylewski, A., Romdhani, S., Theobalt, C., Blanz, V., Vetter, T. 3D Morphable Face Models - Past, Present and Future arxiv preprint arXiv:1909.01815, September 2019 (article)

paper project page [BibTex]

Thumb xl hessepami
Learning and Tracking the 3D Body Shape of Freely Moving Infants from RGB-D sequences

Hesse, N., Pujades, S., Black, M., Arens, M., Hofmann, U., Schroeder, S.

Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2019 (article)

Abstract
Statistical models of the human body surface are generally learned from thousands of high-quality 3D scans in predefined poses to cover the wide variety of human body shapes and articulations. Acquisition of such data requires expensive equipment, calibration procedures, and is limited to cooperative subjects who can understand and follow instructions, such as adults. We present a method for learning a statistical 3D Skinned Multi-Infant Linear body model (SMIL) from incomplete, low-quality RGB-D sequences of freely moving infants. Quantitative experiments show that SMIL faithfully represents the RGB-D data and properly factorizes the shape and pose of the infants. To demonstrate the applicability of SMIL, we fit the model to RGB-D sequences of freely moving infants and show, with a case study, that our method captures enough motion detail for General Movements Assessment (GMA), a method used in clinical practice for early detection of neurodevelopmental disorders in infants. SMIL provides a new tool for analyzing infant shape and movement and is a step towards an automated system for GMA.

pdf Journal DOI [BibTex]

Hesse, N., Pujades, S., Black, M., Arens, M., Hofmann, U., Schroeder, S. Learning and Tracking the 3D Body Shape of Freely Moving Infants from RGB-D sequences Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2019 (article)

pdf Journal DOI [BibTex]

Thumb xl kenny
Perceptual Effects of Inconsistency in Human Animations

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

ACM Trans. Appl. Percept., 16(1):2:1-2:18, Febuary 2019 (article)

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. From these data, 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. Using these stimuli we conducted three experiments in an immersive virtual reality environment. First, a group of participants detected which of two stimuli was inconsistent. Performance was very low, and results were only marginally significant. Next, a second group of participants rated perceived attractiveness, eeriness, and humanness of consistent and inconsistent stimuli, but these judgements of animation characteristics were not affected by consistency of the stimuli. Finally, a third group of participants rated properties of the objects rather than of the performers. Here, we found strong influences of shape-motion inconsistency on perceived weight and thrown distance of objects. This suggests that the visual system relies on its knowledge of shape and motion and that these components are assimilated into an altered perception of the action outcome. We propose that the visual system attempts to resist inconsistent interpretations of human animations. Actions involving object manipulations present an opportunity for the visual system to reinterpret the introduced inconsistencies as a change in the dynamics of an object rather than as an unexpected combination of body shape and body motion.

publisher pdf DOI [BibTex]

Kenny, S., Mahmood, N., Honda, C., Black, M. J., Troje, N. F. Perceptual Effects of Inconsistency in Human Animations ACM Trans. Appl. Percept., 16(1):2:1-2:18, Febuary 2019 (article)

publisher pdf DOI [BibTex]

Thumb xl webteaser
Perceiving Systems (2016-2018)
Scientific Advisory Board Report, 2019 (misc)

pdf [BibTex]

Perceiving Systems (2016-2018) Scientific Advisory Board Report, 2019 (misc)

pdf [BibTex]

Thumb xl virtualcaliper
The Virtual Caliper: Rapid Creation of Metrically Accurate Avatars from 3D Measurements

Pujades, S., Mohler, B., Thaler, A., Tesch, J., Mahmood, N., Hesse, N., Bülthoff, H. H., Black, M. J.

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 25, pages: 1887,1897, IEEE, 2019 (article)

Abstract
Creating metrically accurate avatars is important for many applications such as virtual clothing try-on, ergonomics, medicine, immersive social media, telepresence, and gaming. Creating avatars that precisely represent a particular individual is challenging however, due to the need for expensive 3D scanners, privacy issues with photographs or videos, and difficulty in making accurate tailoring measurements. We overcome these challenges by creating “The Virtual Caliper”, which uses VR game controllers to make simple measurements. First, we establish what body measurements users can reliably make on their own body. We find several distance measurements to be good candidates and then verify that these are linearly related to 3D body shape as represented by the SMPL body model. The Virtual Caliper enables novice users to accurately measure themselves and create an avatar with their own body shape. We evaluate the metric accuracy relative to ground truth 3D body scan data, compare the method quantitatively to other avatar creation tools, and perform extensive perceptual studies. We also provide a software application to the community that enables novices to rapidly create avatars in fewer than five minutes. Not only is our approach more rapid than existing methods, it exports a metrically accurate 3D avatar model that is rigged and skinned.

Project Page IEEE Open Access IEEE Open Access PDF DOI [BibTex]

Pujades, S., Mohler, B., Thaler, A., Tesch, J., Mahmood, N., Hesse, N., Bülthoff, H. H., Black, M. J. The Virtual Caliper: Rapid Creation of Metrically Accurate Avatars from 3D Measurements IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 25, pages: 1887,1897, IEEE, 2019 (article)

Project Page IEEE Open Access IEEE Open Access PDF DOI [BibTex]

2017

Thumb xl flamewebteaserwide
Learning a model of facial shape and expression from 4D scans

Li, T., Bolkart, T., Black, M. J., Li, H., Romero, J.

ACM Transactions on Graphics, 36(6):194:1-194:17, November 2017, Two first authors contributed equally (article)

Abstract
The field of 3D face modeling has a large gap between high-end and low-end methods. At the high end, the best facial animation is indistinguishable from real humans, but this comes at the cost of extensive manual labor. At the low end, face capture from consumer depth sensors relies on 3D face models that are not expressive enough to capture the variability in natural facial shape and expression. We seek a middle ground by learning a facial model from thousands of accurately aligned 3D scans. Our FLAME model (Faces Learned with an Articulated Model and Expressions) is designed to work with existing graphics software and be easy to fit to data. FLAME uses a linear shape space trained from 3800 scans of human heads. FLAME combines this linear shape space with an articulated jaw, neck, and eyeballs, pose-dependent corrective blendshapes, and additional global expression from 4D face sequences in the D3DFACS dataset along with additional 4D sequences.We accurately register a template mesh to the scan sequences and make the D3DFACS registrations available for research purposes. In total the model is trained from over 33, 000 scans. FLAME is low-dimensional but more expressive than the FaceWarehouse model and the Basel Face Model. We compare FLAME to these models by fitting them to static 3D scans and 4D sequences using the same optimization method. FLAME is significantly more accurate and is available for research purposes (http://flame.is.tue.mpg.de).

data/model video code chumpy code tensorflow paper supplemental Project Page [BibTex]

2017

Li, T., Bolkart, T., Black, M. J., Li, H., Romero, J. Learning a model of facial shape and expression from 4D scans ACM Transactions on Graphics, 36(6):194:1-194:17, November 2017, Two first authors contributed equally (article)

data/model video code chumpy code tensorflow paper supplemental Project Page [BibTex]

Thumb xl molbert
Investigating Body Image Disturbance in Anorexia Nervosa Using Novel Biometric Figure Rating Scales: A Pilot Study

Mölbert, S. C., Thaler, A., Streuber, S., Black, M. J., Karnath, H., Zipfel, S., Mohler, B., Giel, K. E.

European Eating Disorders Review, 25(6):607-612, November 2017 (article)

Abstract
This study uses novel biometric figure rating scales (FRS) spanning body mass index (BMI) 13.8 to 32.2 kg/m2 and BMI 18 to 42 kg/m2. The aims of the study were (i) to compare FRS body weight dissatisfaction and perceptual distortion of women with anorexia nervosa (AN) to a community sample; (ii) how FRS parameters are associated with questionnaire body dissatisfaction, eating disorder symptoms and appearance comparison habits; and (iii) whether the weight spectrum of the FRS matters. Women with AN (n = 24) and a community sample of women (n = 104) selected their current and ideal body on the FRS and completed additional questionnaires. Women with AN accurately picked the body that aligned best with their actual weight in both FRS. Controls underestimated their BMI in the FRS 14–32 and were accurate in the FRS 18–42. In both FRS, women with AN desired a body close to their actual BMI and controls desired a thinner body. Our observations suggest that body image disturbance in AN is unlikely to be characterized by a visual perceptual disturbance, but rather by an idealization of underweight in conjunction with high body dissatisfaction. The weight spectrum of FRS can influence the accuracy of BMI estimation.

publisher DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Thumb xl manoteaser
Embodied Hands: Modeling and Capturing Hands and Bodies Together

Romero, J., Tzionas, D., Black, M. J.

ACM Transactions on Graphics, (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia), 36(6):245:1-245:17, 245:1–245:17, ACM, November 2017 (article)

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

website youtube paper suppl video link (url) DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Romero, J., Tzionas, D., Black, M. J. Embodied Hands: Modeling and Capturing Hands and Bodies Together ACM Transactions on Graphics, (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia), 36(6):245:1-245:17, 245:1–245:17, ACM, November 2017 (article)

website youtube paper suppl video link (url) DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Thumb xl cover tro paper
An Online Scalable Approach to Unified Multirobot Cooperative Localization and Object Tracking

Ahmad, A., Lawless, G., Lima, P.

IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 33, pages: 1184 - 1199, October 2017 (article)

Abstract
In this article we present a unified approach for multi-robot cooperative simultaneous localization and object tracking based on particle filters. Our approach is scalable with respect to the number of robots in the team. We introduce a method that reduces, from an exponential to a linear growth, the space and computation time requirements with respect to the number of robots in order to maintain a given level of accuracy in the full state estimation. Our method requires no increase in the number of particles with respect to the number of robots. However, in our method each particle represents a full state hypothesis, leading to the linear dependency on the number of robots of both space and time complexity. The derivation of the algorithm implementing our approach from a standard particle filter algorithm and its complexity analysis are presented. Through an extensive set of simulation experiments on a large number of randomized datasets, we demonstrate the correctness and efficacy of our approach. Through real robot experiments on a standardized open dataset of a team of four soccer playing robots tracking a ball, we evaluate our method's estimation accuracy with respect to the ground truth values. Through comparisons with other methods based on i) nonlinear least squares minimization and ii) joint extended Kalman filter, we further highlight our method's advantages. Finally, we also present a robustness test for our approach by evaluating it under scenarios of communication and vision failure in teammate robots.

Published Version link (url) DOI [BibTex]

Thumb xl provisional
Parameterized Model of 2D Articulated Human Shape

Black, M. J., Freifeld, O., Weiss, A., Loper, M., Guan, P.

September 2017, U.S.~Patent 9,761,060 (misc)

Abstract
Disclosed are computer-readable devices, systems and methods for generating a model of a clothed body. The method includes generating a model of an unclothed human body, the model capturing a shape or a pose of the unclothed human body, determining two-dimensional contours associated with the model, and computing deformations by aligning a contour of a clothed human body with a contour of the unclothed human body. Based on the two-dimensional contours and the deformations, the method includes generating a first two-dimensional model of the unclothed human body, the first two-dimensional model factoring the deformations of the unclothed human body into one or more of a shape variation component, a viewpoint change, and a pose variation and learning an eigen-clothing model using principal component analysis applied to the deformations, wherein the eigen-clothing model classifies different types of clothing, to yield a second two-dimensional model of a clothed human body.

Google Patents [BibTex]

Thumb xl bodytalk
Crowdshaping Realistic 3D Avatars with Words

Streuber, S., Ramirez, M. Q., Black, M., Zuffi, S., O’Toole, A., Hill, M. Q., Hahn, C. A.

August 2017, Application PCT/EP2017/051954 (misc)

Abstract
A method for generating a body shape, comprising the steps: - receiving one or more linguistic descriptors related to the body shape; - retrieving an association between the one or more linguistic descriptors and a body shape; and - generating the body shape, based on the association.

Google Patents [BibTex]

Streuber, S., Ramirez, M. Q., Black, M., Zuffi, S., O’Toole, A., Hill, M. Q., Hahn, C. A. Crowdshaping Realistic 3D Avatars with Words August 2017, Application PCT/EP2017/051954 (misc)

Google Patents [BibTex]

Thumb xl dapepatent
System and method for simulating realistic clothing

Black, M. J., Guan, P.

June 2017, U.S.~Patent 9,679,409 B2 (misc)

Abstract
Systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media for simulating realistic clothing. The system generates a clothing deformation model for a clothing type, wherein the clothing deformation model factors a change of clothing shape due to rigid limb rotation, pose-independent body shape, and pose-dependent deformations. Next, the system generates a custom-shaped garment for a given body by mapping, via the clothing deformation model, body shape parameters to clothing shape parameters. The system then automatically dresses the given body with the custom- shaped garment.

Google Patents pdf [BibTex]

Thumb xl early stopping teaser
Early Stopping Without a Validation Set

Mahsereci, M., Balles, L., Lassner, C., Hennig, P.

arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.09580, 2017 (article)

Abstract
Early stopping is a widely used technique to prevent poor generalization performance when training an over-expressive model by means of gradient-based optimization. To find a good point to halt the optimizer, a common practice is to split the dataset into a training and a smaller validation set to obtain an ongoing estimate of the generalization performance. In this paper we propose a novel early stopping criterion which is based on fast-to-compute, local statistics of the computed gradients and entirely removes the need for a held-out validation set. Our experiments show that this is a viable approach in the setting of least-squares and logistic regression as well as neural networks.

link (url) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Thumb xl web image
Data-Driven Physics for Human Soft Tissue Animation

Kim, M., Pons-Moll, G., Pujades, S., Bang, S., Kim, J., Black, M. J., Lee, S.

ACM Transactions on Graphics, (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 36(4):54:1-54:12, 2017 (article)

Abstract
Data driven models of human poses and soft-tissue deformations can produce very realistic results, but they only model the visible surface of the human body and cannot create skin deformation due to interactions with the environment. Physical simulations can generalize to external forces, but their parameters are difficult to control. In this paper, we present a layered volumetric human body model learned from data. Our model is composed of a data-driven inner layer and a physics-based external layer. The inner layer is driven with a volumetric statistical body model (VSMPL). The soft tissue layer consists of a tetrahedral mesh that is driven using the finite element method (FEM). Model parameters, namely the segmentation of the body into layers and the soft tissue elasticity, are learned directly from 4D registrations of humans exhibiting soft tissue deformations. The learned two layer model is a realistic full-body avatar that generalizes to novel motions and external forces. Experiments show that the resulting avatars produce realistic results on held out sequences and react to external forces. Moreover, the model supports the retargeting of physical properties from one avatar when they share the same topology.

video paper link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

Kim, M., Pons-Moll, G., Pujades, S., Bang, S., Kim, J., Black, M. J., Lee, S. Data-Driven Physics for Human Soft Tissue Animation ACM Transactions on Graphics, (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 36(4):54:1-54:12, 2017 (article)

video paper link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

Thumb xl web teaser eg
Sparse Inertial Poser: Automatic 3D Human Pose Estimation from Sparse IMUs

(Best Paper, Eurographics 2017)

Marcard, T. V., Rosenhahn, B., Black, M., Pons-Moll, G.

Computer Graphics Forum 36(2), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics (Eurographics), pages: 349-360 , 2017 (article)

Abstract
We address the problem of making human motion capture in the wild more practical by using a small set of inertial sensors attached to the body. Since the problem is heavily under-constrained, previous methods either use a large number of sensors, which is intrusive, or they require additional video input. We take a different approach and constrain the problem by: (i) making use of a realistic statistical body model that includes anthropometric constraints and (ii) using a joint optimization framework to fit the model to orientation and acceleration measurements over multiple frames. The resulting tracker Sparse Inertial Poser (SIP) enables motion capture using only 6 sensors (attached to the wrists, lower legs, back and head) and works for arbitrary human motions. Experiments on the recently released TNT15 dataset show that, using the same number of sensors, SIP achieves higher accuracy than the dataset baseline without using any video data. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of SIP on newly recorded challenging motions in outdoor scenarios such as climbing or jumping over a wall

video pdf Project Page [BibTex]

Marcard, T. V., Rosenhahn, B., Black, M., Pons-Moll, G. Sparse Inertial Poser: Automatic 3D Human Pose Estimation from Sparse IMUs Computer Graphics Forum 36(2), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics (Eurographics), pages: 349-360 , 2017 (article)

video pdf Project Page [BibTex]

Thumb xl pami 2017 teaser
Efficient 2D and 3D Facade Segmentation using Auto-Context

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

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2017 (article)

Abstract
This paper introduces a fast and efficient segmentation technique for 2D images and 3D point clouds of building facades. Facades of buildings are highly structured and consequently most methods that have been proposed for this problem aim to make use of this strong prior information. Contrary to most prior work, we are describing a system that is almost domain independent and consists of standard segmentation methods. We train a sequence of boosted decision trees using auto-context features. This is learned using stacked generalization. We find that this technique performs better, or comparable with all previous published methods and present empirical results on all available 2D and 3D facade benchmark datasets. The proposed method is simple to implement, easy to extend, and very efficient at test-time inference.

arXiv Project Page [BibTex]

Gadde, R., Jampani, V., Marlet, R., Gehler, P. Efficient 2D and 3D Facade Segmentation using Auto-Context IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2017 (article)

arXiv Project Page [BibTex]

Thumb xl web image
ClothCap: Seamless 4D Clothing Capture and Retargeting

Pons-Moll, G., Pujades, S., Hu, S., Black, M.

ACM Transactions on Graphics, (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 36(4):73:1-73:15, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2017, Two first authors contributed equally (article)

Abstract
Designing and simulating realistic clothing is challenging and, while several methods have addressed the capture of clothing from 3D scans, previous methods have been limited to single garments and simple motions, lack detail, or require specialized texture patterns. Here we address the problem of capturing regular clothing on fully dressed people in motion. People typically wear multiple pieces of clothing at a time. To estimate the shape of such clothing, track it over time, and render it believably, each garment must be segmented from the others and the body. Our ClothCap approach uses a new multi-part 3D model of clothed bodies, automatically segments each piece of clothing, estimates the naked body shape and pose under the clothing, and tracks the 3D deformations of the clothing over time. We estimate the garments and their motion from 4D scans; that is, high-resolution 3D scans of the subject in motion at 60 fps. The model allows us to capture a clothed person in motion, extract their clothing, and retarget the clothing to new body shapes. ClothCap provides a step towards virtual try-on with a technology for capturing, modeling, and analyzing clothing in motion.

video project_page paper link (url) DOI Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Pons-Moll, G., Pujades, S., Hu, S., Black, M. ClothCap: Seamless 4D Clothing Capture and Retargeting ACM Transactions on Graphics, (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 36(4):73:1-73:15, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2017, Two first authors contributed equally (article)

video project_page paper link (url) DOI Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

2010

Thumb xl graspimagesmall
Decoding complete reach and grasp actions from local primary motor cortex populations

(Featured in Nature’s Research Highlights (Nature, Vol 466, 29 July 2010))

Vargas-Irwin, C. E., Shakhnarovich, G., Yadollahpour, P., Mislow, J., Black, M. J., Donoghue, J. P.

J. of Neuroscience, 39(29):9659-9669, July 2010 (article)

pdf pdf from publisher Movie 1 Movie 2 Project Page [BibTex]

2010

Vargas-Irwin, C. E., Shakhnarovich, G., Yadollahpour, P., Mislow, J., Black, M. J., Donoghue, J. P. Decoding complete reach and grasp actions from local primary motor cortex populations J. of Neuroscience, 39(29):9659-9669, July 2010 (article)

pdf pdf from publisher Movie 1 Movie 2 Project Page [BibTex]

Thumb xl ijcvcoverhd
Guest editorial: State of the art in image- and video-based human pose and motion estimation

Sigal, L., Black, M. J.

International Journal of Computer Vision, 87(1):1-3, March 2010 (article)

pdf from publisher [BibTex]

Sigal, L., Black, M. J. Guest editorial: State of the art in image- and video-based human pose and motion estimation International Journal of Computer Vision, 87(1):1-3, March 2010 (article)

pdf from publisher [BibTex]

Thumb xl humanevaimagesmall2
HumanEva: Synchronized video and motion capture dataset and baseline algorithm for evaluation of articulated human motion

Sigal, L., Balan, A., Black, M. J.

International Journal of Computer Vision, 87(1):4-27, Springer Netherlands, March 2010 (article)

Abstract
While research on articulated human motion and pose estimation has progressed rapidly in the last few years, there has been no systematic quantitative evaluation of competing methods to establish the current state of the art. We present data obtained using a hardware system that is able to capture synchronized video and ground-truth 3D motion. The resulting HumanEva datasets contain multiple subjects performing a set of predefined actions with a number of repetitions. On the order of 40,000 frames of synchronized motion capture and multi-view video (resulting in over one quarter million image frames in total) were collected at 60 Hz with an additional 37,000 time instants of pure motion capture data. A standard set of error measures is defined for evaluating both 2D and 3D pose estimation and tracking algorithms. We also describe a baseline algorithm for 3D articulated tracking that uses a relatively standard Bayesian framework with optimization in the form of Sequential Importance Resampling and Annealed Particle Filtering. In the context of this baseline algorithm we explore a variety of likelihood functions, prior models of human motion and the effects of algorithm parameters. Our experiments suggest that image observation models and motion priors play important roles in performance, and that in a multi-view laboratory environment, where initialization is available, Bayesian filtering tends to perform well. The datasets and the software are made available to the research community. This infrastructure will support the development of new articulated motion and pose estimation algorithms, will provide a baseline for the evaluation and comparison of new methods, and will help establish the current state of the art in human pose estimation and tracking.

pdf pdf from publisher [BibTex]

Sigal, L., Balan, A., Black, M. J. HumanEva: Synchronized video and motion capture dataset and baseline algorithm for evaluation of articulated human motion International Journal of Computer Vision, 87(1):4-27, Springer Netherlands, March 2010 (article)

pdf pdf from publisher [BibTex]

Thumb xl ncomm fig2
Automated Home-Cage Behavioral Phenotyping of Mice

Jhuang, H., Garrote, E., Mutch, J., Poggio, T., Steele, A., Serre, T.

Nature Communications, Nature Communications, 2010 (article)

software, demo pdf [BibTex]

Jhuang, H., Garrote, E., Mutch, J., Poggio, T., Steele, A., Serre, T. Automated Home-Cage Behavioral Phenotyping of Mice Nature Communications, Nature Communications, 2010 (article)

software, demo pdf [BibTex]

Thumb xl jampani10 msr
ImageFlow: Streaming Image Search

Jampani, V., Ramos, G., Drucker, S.

MSR-TR-2010-148, Microsoft Research, Redmond, 2010 (techreport)

Abstract
Traditional grid and list representations of image search results are the dominant interaction paradigms that users face on a daily basis, yet it is unclear that such paradigms are well-suited for experiences where the user‟s task is to browse images for leisure, to discover new information or to seek particular images to represent ideas. We introduce ImageFlow, a novel image search user interface that ex-plores a different alternative to the traditional presentation of image search results. ImageFlow presents image results on a canvas where we map semantic features (e.g., rele-vance, related queries) to the canvas‟ spatial dimensions (e.g., x, y, z) in a way that allows for several levels of en-gagement – from passively viewing a stream of images, to seamlessly navigating through the semantic space and ac-tively collecting images for sharing and reuse. We have implemented our system as a fully functioning prototype, and we report on promising, preliminary usage results.

url pdf link (url) [BibTex]

Jampani, V., Ramos, G., Drucker, S. ImageFlow: Streaming Image Search MSR-TR-2010-148, Microsoft Research, Redmond, 2010 (techreport)

url pdf link (url) [BibTex]

Thumb xl thumb screen shot 2012 10 06 at 12.00.36 pm
Visual Object-Action Recognition: Inferring Object Affordances from Human Demonstration

Kjellström, H., Romero, J., Kragic, D.

Computer Vision and Image Understanding, pages: 81-90, 2010 (article)

Pdf [BibTex]

Kjellström, H., Romero, J., Kragic, D. Visual Object-Action Recognition: Inferring Object Affordances from Human Demonstration Computer Vision and Image Understanding, pages: 81-90, 2010 (article)

Pdf [BibTex]

2008

Thumb xl screen shot 2012 06 06 at 11.28.04 am
Infinite Kernel Learning

Gehler, P., Nowozin, S.

(178), Max Planck Institute, octomber 2008 (techreport)

project page pdf [BibTex]

2008

Gehler, P., Nowozin, S. Infinite Kernel Learning (178), Max Planck Institute, octomber 2008 (techreport)

project page pdf [BibTex]

Thumb xl jnm
A non-parametric Bayesian alternative to spike sorting

Wood, F., Black, M. J.

J. Neuroscience Methods, 173(1):1–12, August 2008 (article)

Abstract
The analysis of extra-cellular neural recordings typically begins with careful spike sorting and all analysis of the data then rests on the correctness of the resulting spike trains. In many situations this is unproblematic as experimental and spike sorting procedures often focus on well isolated units. There is evidence in the literature, however, that errors in spike sorting can occur even with carefully collected and selected data. Additionally, chronically implanted electrodes and arrays with fixed electrodes cannot be easily adjusted to provide well isolated units. In these situations, multiple units may be recorded and the assignment of waveforms to units may be ambiguous. At the same time, analysis of such data may be both scientifically important and clinically relevant. In this paper we address this issue using a novel probabilistic model that accounts for several important sources of uncertainty and error in spike sorting. In lieu of sorting neural data to produce a single best spike train, we estimate a probabilistic model of spike trains given the observed data. We show how such a distribution over spike sortings can support standard neuroscientific questions while providing a representation of uncertainty in the analysis. As a representative illustration of the approach, we analyzed primary motor cortical tuning with respect to hand movement in data recorded with a chronic multi-electrode array in non-human primates.We found that the probabilistic analysis generally agrees with human sorters but suggests the presence of tuned units not detected by humans.

pdf preprint pdf from publisher PubMed [BibTex]

Wood, F., Black, M. J. A non-parametric Bayesian alternative to spike sorting J. Neuroscience Methods, 173(1):1–12, August 2008 (article)

pdf preprint pdf from publisher PubMed [BibTex]

Thumb xl pointclickimagesmall2
Neural control of computer cursor velocity by decoding motor cortical spiking activity in humans with tetraplegia

(J. Neural Engineering Highlights of 2008 Collection)

Kim, S., Simeral, J., Hochberg, L., Donoghue, J. P., Black, M. J.

J. Neural Engineering, 5, pages: 455–476, 2008 (article)

Abstract
Computer-mediated connections between human motor cortical neurons and assistive devices promise to improve or restore lost function in people with paralysis. Recently, a pilot clinical study of an intracortical neural interface system demonstrated that a tetraplegic human was able to obtain continuous two-dimensional control of a computer cursor using neural activity recorded from his motor cortex. This control, however, was not sufficiently accurate for reliable use in many common computer control tasks. Here, we studied several central design choices for such a system including the kinematic representation for cursor movement, the decoding method that translates neuronal ensemble spiking activity into a control signal and the cursor control task used during training for optimizing the parameters of the decoding method. In two tetraplegic participants, we found that controlling a cursor’s velocity resulted in more accurate closed-loop control than controlling its position directly and that cursor velocity control was achieved more rapidly than position control. Control quality was further improved over conventional linear filters by using a probabilistic method, the Kalman filter, to decode human motor cortical activity. Performance assessment based on standard metrics used for the evaluation of a wide range of pointing devices demonstrated significantly improved cursor control with velocity rather than position decoding.

pdf preprint pdf from publisher [BibTex]

Kim, S., Simeral, J., Hochberg, L., Donoghue, J. P., Black, M. J. Neural control of computer cursor velocity by decoding motor cortical spiking activity in humans with tetraplegia J. Neural Engineering, 5, pages: 455–476, 2008 (article)

pdf preprint pdf from publisher [BibTex]

Thumb xl woodtr
Incremental nonparametric Bayesian regression

Wood, F., Grollman, D. H., Heller, K. A., Jenkins, O. C., Black, M. J.

(CS-08-07), Brown University, Department of Computer Science, 2008 (techreport)

pdf [BibTex]

Wood, F., Grollman, D. H., Heller, K. A., Jenkins, O. C., Black, M. J. Incremental nonparametric Bayesian regression (CS-08-07), Brown University, Department of Computer Science, 2008 (techreport)

pdf [BibTex]

Thumb xl jmiv08brownian
Brownian Warps for Non-Rigid Registration

Mads Nielsen, Peter Johansen, Andrew Jackson, Benny Lautrup, Soren Hauberg

Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, 31, pages: 221-231, Springer Netherlands, 2008 (article)

Publishers site PDF [BibTex]

Mads Nielsen, Peter Johansen, Andrew Jackson, Benny Lautrup, Soren Hauberg Brownian Warps for Non-Rigid Registration Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, 31, pages: 221-231, Springer Netherlands, 2008 (article)

Publishers site PDF [BibTex]

Thumb xl jmiv08theater
An Efficient Algorithm for Modelling Duration in Hidden Markov Models, with a Dramatic Application

Soren Hauberg, Jakob Sloth

Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, 31, pages: 165-170, Springer Netherlands, 2008 (article)

Publishers site Paper site PDF [BibTex]

Soren Hauberg, Jakob Sloth An Efficient Algorithm for Modelling Duration in Hidden Markov Models, with a Dramatic Application Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, 31, pages: 165-170, Springer Netherlands, 2008 (article)

Publishers site Paper site PDF [BibTex]

2003

Thumb xl hedvig
Learning the statistics of people in images and video

Sidenbladh, H., Black, M. J.

International Journal of Computer Vision, 54(1-3):183-209, August 2003 (article)

Abstract
This paper address the problems of modeling the appearance of humans and distinguishing human appearance from the appearance of general scenes. We seek a model of appearance and motion that is generic in that it accounts for the ways in which people's appearance varies and, at the same time, is specific enough to be useful for tracking people in natural scenes. Given a 3D model of the person projected into an image we model the likelihood of observing various image cues conditioned on the predicted locations and orientations of the limbs. These cues are taken to be steered filter responses corresponding to edges, ridges, and motion-compensated temporal differences. Motivated by work on the statistics of natural scenes, the statistics of these filter responses for human limbs are learned from training images containing hand-labeled limb regions. Similarly, the statistics of the filter responses in general scenes are learned to define a “background” distribution. The likelihood of observing a scene given a predicted pose of a person is computed, for each limb, using the likelihood ratio between the learned foreground (person) and background distributions. Adopting a Bayesian formulation allows cues to be combined in a principled way. Furthermore, the use of learned distributions obviates the need for hand-tuned image noise models and thresholds. The paper provides a detailed analysis of the statistics of how people appear in scenes and provides a connection between work on natural image statistics and the Bayesian tracking of people.

pdf pdf from publisher code DOI [BibTex]

2003

Sidenbladh, H., Black, M. J. Learning the statistics of people in images and video International Journal of Computer Vision, 54(1-3):183-209, August 2003 (article)

pdf pdf from publisher code DOI [BibTex]

Thumb xl delatorreijcvteaser
A framework for robust subspace learning

De la Torre, F., Black, M. J.

International Journal of Computer Vision, 54(1-3):117-142, August 2003 (article)

Abstract
Many computer vision, signal processing and statistical problems can be posed as problems of learning low dimensional linear or multi-linear models. These models have been widely used for the representation of shape, appearance, motion, etc., in computer vision applications. Methods for learning linear models can be seen as a special case of subspace fitting. One draw-back of previous learning methods is that they are based on least squares estimation techniques and hence fail to account for “outliers” which are common in realistic training sets. We review previous approaches for making linear learning methods robust to outliers and present a new method that uses an intra-sample outlier process to account for pixel outliers. We develop the theory of Robust Subspace Learning (RSL) for linear models within a continuous optimization framework based on robust M-estimation. The framework applies to a variety of linear learning problems in computer vision including eigen-analysis and structure from motion. Several synthetic and natural examples are used to develop and illustrate the theory and applications of robust subspace learning in computer vision.

pdf code pdf from publisher Project Page [BibTex]

De la Torre, F., Black, M. J. A framework for robust subspace learning International Journal of Computer Vision, 54(1-3):117-142, August 2003 (article)

pdf code pdf from publisher Project Page [BibTex]

Thumb xl ijcvcoverhd
Guest editorial: Computational vision at Brown

Black, M. J., Kimia, B.

International Journal of Computer Vision, 54(1-3):5-11, August 2003 (article)

pdf pdf from publisher [BibTex]

Black, M. J., Kimia, B. Guest editorial: Computational vision at Brown International Journal of Computer Vision, 54(1-3):5-11, August 2003 (article)

pdf pdf from publisher [BibTex]

Thumb xl cviu91teaser
Robust parameterized component analysis: Theory and applications to 2D facial appearance models

De la Torre, F., Black, M. J.

Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 91(1-2):53-71, July 2003 (article)

Abstract
Principal component analysis (PCA) has been successfully applied to construct linear models of shape, graylevel, and motion in images. In particular, PCA has been widely used to model the variation in the appearance of people's faces. We extend previous work on facial modeling for tracking faces in video sequences as they undergo significant changes due to facial expressions. Here we consider person-specific facial appearance models (PSFAM), which use modular PCA to model complex intra-person appearance changes. Such models require aligned visual training data; in previous work, this has involved a time consuming and error-prone hand alignment and cropping process. Instead, the main contribution of this paper is to introduce parameterized component analysis to learn a subspace that is invariant to affine (or higher order) geometric transformations. The automatic learning of a PSFAM given a training image sequence is posed as a continuous optimization problem and is solved with a mixture of stochastic and deterministic techniques achieving sub-pixel accuracy. We illustrate the use of the 2D PSFAM model with preliminary experiments relevant to applications including video-conferencing and avatar animation.

pdf [BibTex]

De la Torre, F., Black, M. J. Robust parameterized component analysis: Theory and applications to 2D facial appearance models Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 91(1-2):53-71, July 2003 (article)

pdf [BibTex]