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50 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2018

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Deep Inertial Poser: Learning to Reconstruct Human Pose from Sparse Inertial Measurements in Real Time

Huang, Y., Kaufmann, M., Aksan, E., Black, M. J., Hilliges, O., Pons-Moll, G.

ACM Transactions on Graphics, (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia), 37, pages: 185:1-185:15, ACM, November 2018, Two first authors contributed equally (article)

Abstract
We demonstrate a novel deep neural network capable of reconstructing human full body pose in real-time from 6 Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) worn on the user's body. In doing so, we address several difficult challenges. First, the problem is severely under-constrained as multiple pose parameters produce the same IMU orientations. Second, capturing IMU data in conjunction with ground-truth poses is expensive and difficult to do in many target application scenarios (e.g., outdoors). Third, modeling temporal dependencies through non-linear optimization has proven effective in prior work but makes real-time prediction infeasible. To address this important limitation, we learn the temporal pose priors using deep learning. To learn from sufficient data, we synthesize IMU data from motion capture datasets. A bi-directional RNN architecture leverages past and future information that is available at training time. At test time, we deploy the network in a sliding window fashion, retaining real time capabilities. To evaluate our method, we recorded DIP-IMU, a dataset consisting of 10 subjects wearing 17 IMUs for validation in 64 sequences with 330,000 time instants; this constitutes the largest IMU dataset publicly available. We quantitatively evaluate our approach on multiple datasets and show results from a real-time implementation. DIP-IMU and the code are available for research purposes.

data code pdf preprint video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

2018

Huang, Y., Kaufmann, M., Aksan, E., Black, M. J., Hilliges, O., Pons-Moll, G. Deep Inertial Poser: Learning to Reconstruct Human Pose from Sparse Inertial Measurements in Real Time ACM Transactions on Graphics, (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia), 37, pages: 185:1-185:15, ACM, November 2018, Two first authors contributed equally (article)

data code pdf preprint video DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Deep Neural Network-based Cooperative Visual Tracking through Multiple Micro Aerial Vehicles

Price, E., Lawless, G., Ludwig, R., Martinovic, I., Buelthoff, H. H., Black, M. J., Ahmad, A.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Robotics and Automation Letters, 3(4):3193-3200, IEEE, October 2018, Also accepted and presented in the 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). (article)

Abstract
Multi-camera tracking of humans and animals in outdoor environments is a relevant and challenging problem. Our approach to it involves a team of cooperating micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) with on-board cameras only. DNNs often fail at objects with small scale or far away from the camera, which are typical characteristics of a scenario with aerial robots. Thus, the core problem addressed in this paper is how to achieve on-board, online, continuous and accurate vision-based detections using DNNs for visual person tracking through MAVs. Our solution leverages cooperation among multiple MAVs and active selection of most informative regions of image. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach through simulations with up to 16 robots and real robot experiments involving two aerial robots tracking a person, while maintaining an active perception-driven formation. ROS-based source code is provided for the benefit of the community.

Published Version link (url) DOI [BibTex]

Price, E., Lawless, G., Ludwig, R., Martinovic, I., Buelthoff, H. H., Black, M. J., Ahmad, A. Deep Neural Network-based Cooperative Visual Tracking through Multiple Micro Aerial Vehicles IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Robotics and Automation Letters, 3(4):3193-3200, IEEE, October 2018, Also accepted and presented in the 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). (article)

Published Version link (url) DOI [BibTex]

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First Impressions of Personality Traits From Body Shapes

Hu, Y., Parde, C. J., Hill, M. Q., Mahmood, N., O’Toole, A. J.

Psychological Science, 29(12):1969-–1983, October 2018 (article)

Abstract
People infer the personalities of others from their facial appearance. Whether they do so from body shapes is less studied. We explored personality inferences made from body shapes. Participants rated personality traits for male and female bodies generated with a three-dimensional body model. Multivariate spaces created from these ratings indicated that people evaluate bodies on valence and agency in ways that directly contrast positive and negative traits from the Big Five domains. Body-trait stereotypes based on the trait ratings revealed a myriad of diverse body shapes that typify individual traits. Personality-trait profiles were predicted reliably from a subset of the body-shape features used to specify the three-dimensional bodies. Body features related to extraversion and conscientiousness were predicted with the highest consensus, followed by openness traits. This study provides the first comprehensive look at the range, diversity, and reliability of personality inferences that people make from body shapes.

publisher site pdf DOI [BibTex]

Hu, Y., Parde, C. J., Hill, M. Q., Mahmood, N., O’Toole, A. J. First Impressions of Personality Traits From Body Shapes Psychological Science, 29(12):1969-–1983, October 2018 (article)

publisher site pdf DOI [BibTex]

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Visual Perception and Evaluation of Photo-Realistic Self-Avatars From 3D Body Scans in Males and Females

Thaler, A., Piryankova, I., Stefanucci, J. K., Pujades, S., de la Rosa, S., Streuber, S., Romero, J., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J.

Frontiers in ICT, 5, pages: 1-14, September 2018 (article)

Abstract
The creation or streaming of photo-realistic self-avatars is important for virtual reality applications that aim for perception and action to replicate real world experience. The appearance and recognition of a digital self-avatar may be especially important for applications related to telepresence, embodied virtual reality, or immersive games. We investigated gender differences in the use of visual cues (shape, texture) of a self-avatar for estimating body weight and evaluating avatar appearance. A full-body scanner was used to capture each participant's body geometry and color information and a set of 3D virtual avatars with realistic weight variations was created based on a statistical body model. Additionally, a second set of avatars was created with an average underlying body shape matched to each participant’s height and weight. In four sets of psychophysical experiments, the influence of visual cues on the accuracy of body weight estimation and the sensitivity to weight changes was assessed by manipulating body shape (own, average) and texture (own photo-realistic, checkerboard). The avatars were presented on a large-screen display, and participants responded to whether the avatar's weight corresponded to their own weight. Participants also adjusted the avatar's weight to their desired weight and evaluated the avatar's appearance with regard to similarity to their own body, uncanniness, and their willingness to accept it as a digital representation of the self. The results of the psychophysical experiments revealed no gender difference in the accuracy of estimating body weight in avatars. However, males accepted a larger weight range of the avatars as corresponding to their own. In terms of the ideal body weight, females but not males desired a thinner body. With regard to the evaluation of avatar appearance, the questionnaire responses suggest that own photo-realistic texture was more important to males for higher similarity ratings, while own body shape seemed to be more important to females. These results argue for gender-specific considerations when creating self-avatars.

pdf DOI [BibTex]

Thaler, A., Piryankova, I., Stefanucci, J. K., Pujades, S., de la Rosa, S., Streuber, S., Romero, J., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J. Visual Perception and Evaluation of Photo-Realistic Self-Avatars From 3D Body Scans in Males and Females Frontiers in ICT, 5, pages: 1-14, September 2018 (article)

pdf DOI [BibTex]

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Robust Physics-based Motion Retargeting with Realistic Body Shapes

Borno, M. A., Righetti, L., Black, M. J., Delp, S. L., Fiume, E., Romero, J.

Computer Graphics Forum, 37, pages: 6:1-12, July 2018 (article)

Abstract
Motion capture is often retargeted to new, and sometimes drastically different, characters. When the characters take on realistic human shapes, however, we become more sensitive to the motion looking right. This means adapting it to be consistent with the physical constraints imposed by different body shapes. We show how to take realistic 3D human shapes, approximate them using a simplified representation, and animate them so that they move realistically using physically-based retargeting. We develop a novel spacetime optimization approach that learns and robustly adapts physical controllers to new bodies and constraints. The approach automatically adapts the motion of the mocap subject to the body shape of a target subject. This motion respects the physical properties of the new body and every body shape results in a different and appropriate movement. This makes it easy to create a varied set of motions from a single mocap sequence by simply varying the characters. In an interactive environment, successful retargeting requires adapting the motion to unexpected external forces. We achieve robustness to such forces using a novel LQR-tree formulation. We show that the simulated motions look appropriate to each character’s anatomy and their actions are robust to perturbations.

pdf video Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Borno, M. A., Righetti, L., Black, M. J., Delp, S. L., Fiume, E., Romero, J. Robust Physics-based Motion Retargeting with Realistic Body Shapes Computer Graphics Forum, 37, pages: 6:1-12, July 2018 (article)

pdf video Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Assessing body image in anorexia nervosa using biometric self-avatars in virtual reality: Attitudinal components rather than visual body size estimation are distorted

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

Psychological Medicine, 48(4):642-653, March 2018 (article)

Abstract
Background: Body image disturbance (BID) is a core symptom of anorexia nervosa (AN), but as yet distinctive features of BID are unknown. The present study aimed at disentangling perceptual and attitudinal components of BID in AN. Methods: We investigated n=24 women with AN and n=24 controls. Based on a 3D body scan, we created realistic virtual 3D bodies (avatars) for each participant that were varied through a range of ±20% of the participants' weights. Avatars were presented in a virtual reality mirror scenario. Using different psychophysical tasks, participants identified and adjusted their actual and their desired body weight. To test for general perceptual biases in estimating body weight, a second experiment investigated perception of weight and shape matched avatars with another identity. Results: Women with AN and controls underestimated their weight, with a trend that women with AN underestimated more. The average desired body of controls had normal weight while the average desired weight of women with AN corresponded to extreme AN (DSM-5). Correlation analyses revealed that desired body weight, but not accuracy of weight estimation, was associated with eating disorder symptoms. In the second experiment, both groups estimated accurately while the most attractive body was similar to Experiment 1. Conclusions: Our results contradict the widespread assumption that patients with AN overestimate their body weight due to visual distortions. Rather, they illustrate that BID might be driven by distorted attitudes with regard to the desired body. Clinical interventions should aim at helping patients with AN to change their desired weight.

doi pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Body size estimation of self and others in females varying in BMI

Thaler, A., Geuss, M. N., Mölbert, S. C., Giel, K. E., Streuber, S., Romero, J., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J.

PLoS ONE, 13(2), Febuary 2018 (article)

Abstract
Previous literature suggests that a disturbed ability to accurately identify own body size may contribute to overweight. Here, we investigated the influence of personal body size, indexed by body mass index (BMI), on body size estimation in a non-clinical population of females varying in BMI. We attempted to disentangle general biases in body size estimates and attitudinal influences by manipulating whether participants believed the body stimuli (personalized avatars with realistic weight variations) represented their own body or that of another person. Our results show that the accuracy of own body size estimation is predicted by personal BMI, such that participants with lower BMI underestimated their body size and participants with higher BMI overestimated their body size. Further, participants with higher BMI were less likely to notice the same percentage of weight gain than participants with lower BMI. Importantly, these results were only apparent when participants were judging a virtual body that was their own identity (Experiment 1), but not when they estimated the size of a body with another identity and the same underlying body shape (Experiment 2a). The different influences of BMI on accuracy of body size estimation and sensitivity to weight change for self and other identity suggests that effects of BMI on visual body size estimation are self-specific and not generalizable to other bodies.

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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Temporal Human Action Segmentation via Dynamic Clustering

Zhang, Y., Sun, H., Tang, S., Neumann, H.

arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.05790, 2018 (article)

Abstract
We present an effective dynamic clustering algorithm for the task of temporal human action segmentation, which has comprehensive applications such as robotics, motion analysis, and patient monitoring. Our proposed algorithm is unsupervised, fast, generic to process various types of features, and applica- ble in both the online and offline settings. We perform extensive experiments of processing data streams, and show that our algorithm achieves the state-of- the-art results for both online and offline settings.

link (url) [BibTex]

Zhang, Y., Sun, H., Tang, S., Neumann, H. Temporal Human Action Segmentation via Dynamic Clustering arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.05790, 2018 (article)

link (url) [BibTex]

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Motion Segmentation & Multiple Object Tracking by Correlation Co-Clustering

Keuper, M., Tang, S., Andres, B., Brox, T., Schiele, B.

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2018 (article)

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Keuper, M., Tang, S., Andres, B., Brox, T., Schiele, B. Motion Segmentation & Multiple Object Tracking by Correlation Co-Clustering IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2018 (article)

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

2017

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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]

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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]

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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]

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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]

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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]

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Appealing Avatars from 3D Body Scans: Perceptual Effects of Stylization

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

In Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications: 11th International Joint Conference, VISIGRAPP 2016, Rome, Italy, February 27 – 29, 2016, Revised Selected Papers, pages: 175-196, Springer International Publishing, 2017 (inbook)

Abstract
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 perceived as most appealing.

publisher site pdf DOI [BibTex]

Fleming, R., Mohler, B. J., Romero, J., Black, M. J., Breidt, M. Appealing Avatars from 3D Body Scans: Perceptual Effects of Stylization In Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications: 11th International Joint Conference, VISIGRAPP 2016, Rome, Italy, February 27 – 29, 2016, Revised Selected Papers, pages: 175-196, Springer International Publishing, 2017 (inbook)

publisher site pdf DOI [BibTex]

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Learning to Filter Object Detections

Prokudin, S., Kappler, D., Nowozin, S., Gehler, P.

In Pattern Recognition: 39th German Conference, GCPR 2017, Basel, Switzerland, September 12–15, 2017, Proceedings, pages: 52-62, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2017 (inbook)

Abstract
Most object detection systems consist of three stages. First, a set of individual hypotheses for object locations is generated using a proposal generating algorithm. Second, a classifier scores every generated hypothesis independently to obtain a multi-class prediction. Finally, all scored hypotheses are filtered via a non-differentiable and decoupled non-maximum suppression (NMS) post-processing step. In this paper, we propose a filtering network (FNet), a method which replaces NMS with a differentiable neural network that allows joint reasoning and re-scoring of the generated set of hypotheses per image. This formulation enables end-to-end training of the full object detection pipeline. First, we demonstrate that FNet, a feed-forward network architecture, is able to mimic NMS decisions, despite the sequential nature of NMS. We further analyze NMS failures and propose a loss formulation that is better aligned with the mean average precision (mAP) evaluation metric. We evaluate FNet on several standard detection datasets. Results surpass standard NMS on highly occluded settings of a synthetic overlapping MNIST dataset and show competitive behavior on PascalVOC2007 and KITTI detection benchmarks.

Paper link (url) DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Prokudin, S., Kappler, D., Nowozin, S., Gehler, P. Learning to Filter Object Detections In Pattern Recognition: 39th German Conference, GCPR 2017, Basel, Switzerland, September 12–15, 2017, Proceedings, pages: 52-62, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2017 (inbook)

Paper link (url) DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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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]

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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]

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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]

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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]

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Decentralized Simultaneous Multi-target Exploration using a Connected Network of Multiple Robots

Nestmeyer, T., Robuffo Giordano, P., Bülthoff, H. H., Franchi, A.

In pages: 989-1011, Autonomous Robots, 2017 (incollection)

[BibTex]

Nestmeyer, T., Robuffo Giordano, P., Bülthoff, H. H., Franchi, A. Decentralized Simultaneous Multi-target Exploration using a Connected Network of Multiple Robots In pages: 989-1011, Autonomous Robots, 2017 (incollection)

[BibTex]

2011

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High-quality reflection separation using polarized images

Kong, N., Tai, Y., Shin, S. Y.

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(12):3393-3405, IEEE Signal Processing Society, December 2011 (article)

Abstract
In this paper, we deal with a problem of separating the effect of reflection from images captured behind glass. The input consists of multiple polarized images captured from the same view point but with different polarizer angles. The output is the high quality separation of the reflection layer and the background layer from the images. We formulate this problem as a constrained optimization problem and propose a framework that allows us to fully exploit the mutually exclusive image information in our input data. We test our approach on various images and demonstrate that our approach can generate good reflection separation results.

Publisher site [BibTex]

2011

Kong, N., Tai, Y., Shin, S. Y. High-quality reflection separation using polarized images IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(12):3393-3405, IEEE Signal Processing Society, December 2011 (article)

Publisher site [BibTex]

no image
A human inspired gaze estimation system

Wulff, J., Sinha, P.

Journal of Vision, 11(11):507-507, ARVO, September 2011 (article)

Abstract
Estimating another person's gaze is a crucial skill in human social interactions. The social component is most apparent in dyadic gaze situations, in which the looker seems to look into the eyes of the observer, thereby signaling interest or a turn to speak. In a triadic situation, on the other hand, the looker's gaze is averted from the observer and directed towards another, specific target. This is mostly interpreted as a cue for joint attention, creating awareness of a predator or another point of interest. In keeping with the task's social significance, humans are very proficient at gaze estimation. Our accuracy ranges from less than one degree for dyadic settings to approximately 2.5 degrees for triadic ones. Our goal in this work is to draw inspiration from human gaze estimation mechanisms in order to create an artificial system that can approach the former's accuracy levels. Since human performance is severely impaired by both image-based degradations (Ando, 2004) and a change of facial configurations (Jenkins & Langton, 2003), the underlying principles are believed to be based both on simple image cues such as contrast/brightness distribution and on more complex geometric processing to reconstruct the actual shape of the head. By incorporating both kinds of cues in our system's design, we are able to surpass the accuracy of existing eye-tracking systems, which rely exclusively on either image-based or geometry-based cues (Yamazoe et al., 2008). A side-benefit of this combined approach is that it allows for gaze estimation despite moderate view-point changes. This is important for settings where subjects, say young children or certain kinds of patients, might not be fully cooperative to allow a careful calibration. Our model and implementation of gaze estimation opens up new experimental questions about human mechanisms while also providing a useful tool for general calibration-free, non-intrusive remote eye-tracking.

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

Wulff, J., Sinha, P. A human inspired gaze estimation system Journal of Vision, 11(11):507-507, ARVO, September 2011 (article)

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

no image
Detecting synchrony in degraded audio-visual streams

Dhandhania, K., Wulff, J., Sinha, P.

Journal of Vision, 11(11):800-800, ARVO, September 2011 (article)

Abstract
Even 8–10 week old infants, when presented with two dynamic faces and a speech stream, look significantly longer at the ‘correct’ talking person (Patterson & Werker, 2003). This is true even though their reduced visual acuity prevents them from utilizing high spatial frequencies. Computational analyses in the field of audio/video synchrony and automatic speaker detection (e.g. Hershey & Movellan, 2000), in contrast, usually depend on high-resolution images. Therefore, the correlation mechanisms found in these computational studies are not directly applicable to the processes through which we learn to integrate the modalities of speech and vision. In this work, we investigated the correlation between speech signals and degraded video signals. We found a high correlation persisting even with high image degradation, resembling the low visual acuity of young infants. Additionally (in a fashion similar to Graf et al., 2002) we explored which parts of the face correlate with the audio in the degraded video sequences. Perfect synchrony and small offsets in the audio were used while finding the correlation, thereby detecting visual events preceding and following audio events. In order to achieve a sufficiently high temporal resolution, high-speed video sequences (500 frames per second) of talking people were used. This is a temporal resolution unachieved in previous studies and has allowed us to capture very subtle and short visual events. We believe that the results of this study might be interesting not only to vision researchers, but, by revealing subtle effects on a very fine timescale, also to people working in computer graphics and the generation and animation of artificial faces.

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

Dhandhania, K., Wulff, J., Sinha, P. Detecting synchrony in degraded audio-visual streams Journal of Vision, 11(11):800-800, ARVO, September 2011 (article)

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

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ISocRob-MSL 2011 Team Description Paper for Middle Sized League

Messias, J., Ahmad, A., Reis, J., Sousa, J., Lima, P.

15th Annual RoboCup International Symposium 2011, July 2011 (techreport)

Abstract
This paper describes the status of the ISocRob MSL robotic soccer team as required by the RoboCup 2011 qualification procedures. The most relevant technical and scientifical developments carried out by the team, since its last participation in the RoboCup MSL competitions, are here detailed. These include cooperative localization, cooperative object tracking, planning under uncertainty, obstacle detection and improvements to self-localization.

link (url) [BibTex]

Messias, J., Ahmad, A., Reis, J., Sousa, J., Lima, P. ISocRob-MSL 2011 Team Description Paper for Middle Sized League 15th Annual RoboCup International Symposium 2011, July 2011 (techreport)

link (url) [BibTex]

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Trajectory Space: A Dual Representation for Nonrigid Structure from Motion

Akhter, I., Sheikh, Y., Khan, S., Kanade, T.

Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on, 33(7):1442-1456, IEEE, July 2011 (article)

Abstract
Existing approaches to nonrigid structure from motion assume that the instantaneous 3D shape of a deforming object is a linear combination of basis shapes. These basis are object dependent and therefore have to be estimated anew for each video sequence. In contrast, we propose a dual approach to describe the evolving 3D structure in trajectory space by a linear combination of basis trajectories. We describe the dual relationship between the two approaches, showing that they both have equal power for representing 3D structure. We further show that the temporal smoothness in 3D trajectories alone can be used for recovering nonrigid structure from a moving camera. The principal advantage of expressing deforming 3D structure in trajectory space is that we can define an object independent basis. This results in a significant reduction in unknowns, and corresponding stability in estimation. We propose the use of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) as the object independent basis and empirically demonstrate that it approaches Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for natural motions. We report the performance of the proposed method, quantitatively using motion capture data, and qualitatively on several video sequences exhibiting nonrigid motions including piecewise rigid motion, partially nonrigid motion (such as a facial expressions), and highly nonrigid motion (such as a person walking or dancing).

pdf project page [BibTex]

Akhter, I., Sheikh, Y., Khan, S., Kanade, T. Trajectory Space: A Dual Representation for Nonrigid Structure from Motion Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on, 33(7):1442-1456, IEEE, July 2011 (article)

pdf project page [BibTex]

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Loose-limbed People: Estimating 3D Human Pose and Motion Using Non-parametric Belief Propagation

Sigal, L., Isard, M., Haussecker, H., Black, M. J.

International Journal of Computer Vision, 98(1):15-48, Springer Netherlands, May 2011 (article)

Abstract
We formulate the problem of 3D human pose estimation and tracking as one of inference in a graphical model. Unlike traditional kinematic tree representations, our model of the body is a collection of loosely-connected body-parts. In particular, we model the body using an undirected graphical model in which nodes correspond to parts and edges to kinematic, penetration, and temporal constraints imposed by the joints and the world. These constraints are encoded using pair-wise statistical distributions, that are learned from motion-capture training data. Human pose and motion estimation is formulated as inference in this graphical model and is solved using Particle Message Passing (PaMPas). PaMPas is a form of non-parametric belief propagation that uses a variation of particle filtering that can be applied over a general graphical model with loops. The loose-limbed model and decentralized graph structure allow us to incorporate information from "bottom-up" visual cues, such as limb and head detectors, into the inference process. These detectors enable automatic initialization and aid recovery from transient tracking failures. We illustrate the method by automatically tracking people in multi-view imagery using a set of calibrated cameras and present quantitative evaluation using the HumanEva dataset.

pdf publisher's site link (url) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Sigal, L., Isard, M., Haussecker, H., Black, M. J. Loose-limbed People: Estimating 3D Human Pose and Motion Using Non-parametric Belief Propagation International Journal of Computer Vision, 98(1):15-48, Springer Netherlands, May 2011 (article)

pdf publisher's site link (url) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Point-and-Click Cursor Control With an Intracortical Neural Interface System by Humans With Tetraplegia

Kim, S., Simeral, J. D., Hochberg, L. R., Donoghue, J. P., Friehs, G. M., Black, M. J.

IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 19(2):193-203, April 2011 (article)

Abstract
We present a point-and-click intracortical neural interface system (NIS) that enables humans with tetraplegia to volitionally move a 2D computer cursor in any desired direction on a computer screen, hold it still and click on the area of interest. This direct brain-computer interface extracts both discrete (click) and continuous (cursor velocity) signals from a single small population of neurons in human motor cortex. A key component of this system is a multi-state probabilistic decoding algorithm that simultaneously decodes neural spiking activity and outputs either a click signal or the velocity of the cursor. The algorithm combines a linear classifier, which determines whether the user is intending to click or move the cursor, with a Kalman filter that translates the neural population activity into cursor velocity. We present a paradigm for training the multi-state decoding algorithm using neural activity observed during imagined actions. Two human participants with tetraplegia (paralysis of the four limbs) performed a closed-loop radial target acquisition task using the point-and-click NIS over multiple sessions. We quantified point-and-click performance using various human-computer interaction measurements for pointing devices. We found that participants were able to control the cursor motion accurately and click on specified targets with a small error rate (< 3% in one participant). This study suggests that signals from a small ensemble of motor cortical neurons (~40) can be used for natural point-and-click 2D cursor control of a personal computer.

pdf publishers's site pub med link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

Kim, S., Simeral, J. D., Hochberg, L. R., Donoghue, J. P., Friehs, G. M., Black, M. J. Point-and-Click Cursor Control With an Intracortical Neural Interface System by Humans With Tetraplegia IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 19(2):193-203, April 2011 (article)

pdf publishers's site pub med link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

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A Database and Evaluation Methodology for Optical Flow

Baker, S., Scharstein, D., Lewis, J. P., Roth, S., Black, M. J., Szeliski, R.

International Journal of Computer Vision, 92(1):1-31, March 2011 (article)

Abstract
The quantitative evaluation of optical flow algorithms by Barron et al. (1994) led to significant advances in performance. The challenges for optical flow algorithms today go beyond the datasets and evaluation methods proposed in that paper. Instead, they center on problems associated with complex natural scenes, including nonrigid motion, real sensor noise, and motion discontinuities. We propose a new set of benchmarks and evaluation methods for the next generation of optical flow algorithms. To that end, we contribute four types of data to test different aspects of optical flow algorithms: (1) sequences with nonrigid motion where the ground-truth flow is determined by tracking hidden fluorescent texture, (2) realistic synthetic sequences, (3) high frame-rate video used to study interpolation error, and (4) modified stereo sequences of static scenes. In addition to the average angular error used by Barron et al., we compute the absolute flow endpoint error, measures for frame interpolation error, improved statistics, and results at motion discontinuities and in textureless regions. In October 2007, we published the performance of several well-known methods on a preliminary version of our data to establish the current state of the art. We also made the data freely available on the web at http://vision.middlebury.edu/flow/ . Subsequently a number of researchers have uploaded their results to our website and published papers using the data. A significant improvement in performance has already been achieved. In this paper we analyze the results obtained to date and draw a large number of conclusions from them.

pdf pdf from publisher Middlebury Flow Evaluation Website [BibTex]

Baker, S., Scharstein, D., Lewis, J. P., Roth, S., Black, M. J., Szeliski, R. A Database and Evaluation Methodology for Optical Flow International Journal of Computer Vision, 92(1):1-31, March 2011 (article)

pdf pdf from publisher Middlebury Flow Evaluation Website [BibTex]

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Neural control of cursor trajectory and click by a human with tetraplegia 1000 days after implant of an intracortical microelectrode array

(J. Neural Engineering Highlights of 2011 Collection. JNE top 10 cited papers of 2010-2011.)

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

J. of Neural Engineering, 8(2):025027, 2011 (article)

Abstract
The ongoing pilot clinical trial of the BrainGate neural interface system aims in part to assess the feasibility of using neural activity obtained from a small-scale, chronically implanted, intracortical microelectrode array to provide control signals for a neural prosthesis system. Critical questions include how long implanted microelectrodes will record useful neural signals, how reliably those signals can be acquired and decoded, and how effectively they can be used to control various assistive technologies such as computers and robotic assistive devices, or to enable functional electrical stimulation of paralyzed muscles. Here we examined these questions by assessing neural cursor control and BrainGate system characteristics on five consecutive days 1000 days after implant of a 4 × 4 mm array of 100 microelectrodes in the motor cortex of a human with longstanding tetraplegia subsequent to a brainstem stroke. On each of five prospectively-selected days we performed time-amplitude sorting of neuronal spiking activity, trained a population-based Kalman velocity decoding filter combined with a linear discriminant click state classifier, and then assessed closed-loop point-and-click cursor control. The participant performed both an eight-target center-out task and a random target Fitts metric task which was adapted from a human-computer interaction ISO standard used to quantify performance of computer input devices. The neural interface system was further characterized by daily measurement of electrode impedances, unit waveforms and local field potentials. Across the five days, spiking signals were obtained from 41 of 96 electrodes and were successfully decoded to provide neural cursor point-and-click control with a mean task performance of 91.3% ± 0.1% (mean ± s.d.) correct target acquisition. Results across five consecutive days demonstrate that a neural interface system based on an intracortical microelectrode array can provide repeatable, accurate point-and-click control of a computer interface to an individual with tetraplegia 1000 days after implantation of this sensor.

pdf pdf from publisher link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

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Benchmark datasets for pose estimation and tracking

Andriluka, M., Sigal, L., Black, M. J.

In Visual Analysis of Humans: Looking at People, pages: 253-274, (Editors: Moesland and Hilton and Kr"uger and Sigal), Springer-Verlag, London, 2011 (incollection)

publisher's site Project Page [BibTex]

Andriluka, M., Sigal, L., Black, M. J. Benchmark datasets for pose estimation and tracking In Visual Analysis of Humans: Looking at People, pages: 253-274, (Editors: Moesland and Hilton and Kr"uger and Sigal), Springer-Verlag, London, 2011 (incollection)

publisher's site Project Page [BibTex]

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Fields of experts

Roth, S., Black, M. J.

In Markov Random Fields for Vision and Image Processing, pages: 297-310, (Editors: Blake, A. and Kohli, P. and Rother, C.), MIT Press, 2011 (incollection)

Abstract
Fields of Experts are high-order Markov random field (MRF) models with potential functions that extend over large pixel neighborhoods. The clique potentials are modeled as a Product of Experts using nonlinear functions of many linear filter responses. In contrast to previous MRF approaches, all parameters, including the linear filters themselves, are learned from training data. A Field of Experts (FoE) provides a generic, expressive image prior that can capture the statistics of natural scenes, and can be used for a variety of machine vision tasks. The capabilities of FoEs are demonstrated with two example applications, image denoising and image inpainting, which are implemented using a simple, approximate inference scheme. While the FoE model is trained on a generic image database and is not tuned toward a specific application, the results compete with specialized techniques.

publisher site [BibTex]

Roth, S., Black, M. J. Fields of experts In Markov Random Fields for Vision and Image Processing, pages: 297-310, (Editors: Blake, A. and Kohli, P. and Rother, C.), MIT Press, 2011 (incollection)

publisher site [BibTex]

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Dorsal Stream: From Algorithm to Neuroscience

Jhuang, H.

PhD Thesis, MIT, 2011 (techreport)

pdf [BibTex]

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Modelling pipeline for subject-specific arterial blood flow—A review

Igor Sazonov, Si Yong Yeo, Rhodri Bevan, Xianghua Xie, Raoul van Loon, Perumal Nithiarasu

International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, 27(12):1868–1910, 2011 (article)

Abstract
In this paper, a robust and semi-automatic modelling pipeline for blood flow through subject-specific arterial geometries is presented. The framework developed consists of image segmentation, domain discretization (meshing) and fluid dynamics. All the three subtopics of the pipeline are explained using an example of flow through a severely stenosed human carotid artery. In the Introduction, the state-of-the-art of both image segmentation and meshing is presented in some detail, and wherever possible the advantages and disadvantages of the existing methods are analysed. Followed by this, the deformable model used for image segmentation is presented. This model is based upon a geometrical potential force (GPF), which is a function of the image. Both the GPF calculation and level set determination are explained. Following the image segmentation method, a semi-automatic meshing method used in the present study is explained in full detail. All the relevant techniques required to generate a valid domain discretization are presented. These techniques include generating a valid surface mesh, skeletonization, mesh cropping, boundary layer mesh construction and various mesh cosmetic methods that are essential for generating a high-quality domain discretization. After presenting the mesh generation procedure, how to generate flow boundary conditions for both the inlets and outlets of a geometry is explained in detail. This is followed by a brief note on the flow solver, before studying the blood flow through the carotid artery with a severe stenosis.

[BibTex]

Igor Sazonov, Si Yong Yeo, Rhodri Bevan, Xianghua Xie, Raoul van Loon, Perumal Nithiarasu Modelling pipeline for subject-specific arterial blood flow—A review International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, 27(12):1868–1910, 2011 (article)

[BibTex]

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Geometrically Induced Force Interaction for Three-Dimensional Deformable Models

Si Yong Yeo, Xianghua Xie, Igor Sazonov, Perumal Nithiarasu

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(5):1373 - 1387, 2011 (article)

Abstract
In this paper, we propose a novel 3-D deformable model that is based upon a geometrically induced external force field which can be conveniently generalized to arbitrary dimensions. This external force field is based upon hypothesized interactions between the relative geometries of the deformable model and the object boundary characterized by image gradient. The evolution of the deformable model is solved using the level set method so that topological changes are handled automatically. The relative geometrical configurations between the deformable model and the object boundaries contribute to a dynamic vector force field that changes accordingly as the deformable model evolves. The geometrically induced dynamic interaction force has been shown to greatly improve the deformable model performance in acquiring complex geometries and highly concave boundaries, and it gives the deformable model a high invariancy in initialization configurations. The voxel interactions across the whole image domain provide a global view of the object boundary representation, giving the external force a long attraction range. The bidirectionality of the external force field allows the new deformable model to deal with arbitrary cross-boundary initializations, and facilitates the handling of weak edges and broken boundaries. In addition, we show that by enhancing the geometrical interaction field with a nonlocal edge-preserving algorithm, the new deformable model can effectively overcome image noise. We provide a comparative study on the segmentation of various geometries with different topologies from both synthetic and real images, and show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements against existing image gradient techniques.

[BibTex]

Si Yong Yeo, Xianghua Xie, Igor Sazonov, Perumal Nithiarasu Geometrically Induced Force Interaction for Three-Dimensional Deformable Models IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(5):1373 - 1387, 2011 (article)

[BibTex]

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Steerable random fields for image restoration and inpainting

Roth, S., Black, M. J.

In Markov Random Fields for Vision and Image Processing, pages: 377-387, (Editors: Blake, A. and Kohli, P. and Rother, C.), MIT Press, 2011 (incollection)

Abstract
This chapter introduces the concept of a Steerable Random Field (SRF). In contrast to traditional Markov random field (MRF) models in low-level vision, the random field potentials of a SRF are defined in terms of filter responses that are steered to the local image structure. This steering uses the structure tensor to obtain derivative responses that are either aligned with, or orthogonal to, the predominant local image structure. Analysis of the statistics of these steered filter responses in natural images leads to the model proposed here. Clique potentials are defined over steered filter responses using a Gaussian scale mixture model and are learned from training data. The SRF model connects random fields with anisotropic regularization and provides a statistical motivation for the latter. Steering the random field to the local image structure improves image denoising and inpainting performance compared with traditional pairwise MRFs.

publisher site [BibTex]

Roth, S., Black, M. J. Steerable random fields for image restoration and inpainting In Markov Random Fields for Vision and Image Processing, pages: 377-387, (Editors: Blake, A. and Kohli, P. and Rother, C.), MIT Press, 2011 (incollection)

publisher site [BibTex]

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Model-Based Pose Estimation

Pons-Moll, G., Rosenhahn, B.

In Visual Analysis of Humans: Looking at People, pages: 139-170, 9, (Editors: T. Moeslund, A. Hilton, V. Krueger, L. Sigal), Springer, 2011 (inbook)

book page pdf [BibTex]

Pons-Moll, G., Rosenhahn, B. Model-Based Pose Estimation In Visual Analysis of Humans: Looking at People, pages: 139-170, 9, (Editors: T. Moeslund, A. Hilton, V. Krueger, L. Sigal), Springer, 2011 (inbook)

book page pdf [BibTex]

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Computational flow studies in a subject-specific human upper airway using a one-equation turbulence model. Influence of the nasal cavity

Prihambodo Saksono, Perumal Nithiarasu, Igor Sazonov, Si Yong Yeo

International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, 87(1-5):96–114, 2011 (article)

Abstract
This paper focuses on the impact of including nasal cavity on airflow through a human upper respiratory tract. A computational study is carried out on a realistic geometry, reconstructed from CT scans of a subject. The geometry includes nasal cavity, pharynx, larynx, trachea and two generations of airway bifurcations below trachea. The unstructured mesh generation procedure is discussed in some length due to the complex nature of the nasal cavity structure and poor scan resolution normally available from hospitals. The fluid dynamic studies have been carried out on the geometry with and without the inclusion of the nasal cavity. The characteristic-based split scheme along with the one-equation Spalart–Allmaras turbulence model is used in its explicit form to obtain flow solutions at steady state. Results reveal that the exclusion of nasal cavity significantly influences the resulting solution. In particular, the location of recirculating flow in the trachea is dramatically different when the truncated geometry is used. In addition, we also address the differences in the solution due to imposed, equally distributed and proportionally distributed flow rates at inlets (both nares). The results show that the differences in flow pattern between the two inlet conditions are not confined to the nasal cavity and nasopharyngeal region, but they propagate down to the trachea.

[BibTex]

Prihambodo Saksono, Perumal Nithiarasu, Igor Sazonov, Si Yong Yeo Computational flow studies in a subject-specific human upper airway using a one-equation turbulence model. Influence of the nasal cavity International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering, 87(1-5):96–114, 2011 (article)

[BibTex]

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Predicting Articulated Human Motion from Spatial Processes

Soren Hauberg, Kim S. Pedersen

International Journal of Computer Vision, 94, pages: 317-334, Springer Netherlands, 2011 (article)

Publishers site Code Paper site PDF [BibTex]

Soren Hauberg, Kim S. Pedersen Predicting Articulated Human Motion from Spatial Processes International Journal of Computer Vision, 94, pages: 317-334, Springer Netherlands, 2011 (article)

Publishers site Code Paper site PDF [BibTex]

2006

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Implicit Wiener Series, Part II: Regularised estimation

Gehler, P., Franz, M.

(148), Max Planck Institute, 2006 (techreport)

pdf [BibTex]

2006

Gehler, P., Franz, M. Implicit Wiener Series, Part II: Regularised estimation (148), Max Planck Institute, 2006 (techreport)

pdf [BibTex]

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HumanEva: Synchronized video and motion capture dataset for evaluation of articulated human motion

Sigal, L., Black, M. J.

(CS-06-08), Brown University, Department of Computer Science, 2006 (techreport)

pdf abstract [BibTex]

Sigal, L., Black, M. J. HumanEva: Synchronized video and motion capture dataset for evaluation of articulated human motion (CS-06-08), Brown University, Department of Computer Science, 2006 (techreport)

pdf abstract [BibTex]

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Bayesian population decoding of motor cortical activity using a Kalman filter

Wu, W., Gao, Y., Bienenstock, E., Donoghue, J. P., Black, M. J.

Neural Computation, 18(1):80-118, 2006 (article)

Abstract
Effective neural motor prostheses require a method for decoding neural activity representing desired movement. In particular, the accurate reconstruction of a continuous motion signal is necessary for the control of devices such as computer cursors, robots, or a patient's own paralyzed limbs. For such applications, we developed a real-time system that uses Bayesian inference techniques to estimate hand motion from the firing rates of multiple neurons. In this study, we used recordings that were previously made in the arm area of primary motor cortex in awake behaving monkeys using a chronically implanted multielectrode microarray. Bayesian inference involves computing the posterior probability of the hand motion conditioned on a sequence of observed firing rates; this is formulated in terms of the product of a likelihood and a prior. The likelihood term models the probability of firing rates given a particular hand motion. We found that a linear gaussian model could be used to approximate this likelihood and could be readily learned from a small amount of training data. The prior term defines a probabilistic model of hand kinematics and was also taken to be a linear gaussian model. Decoding was performed using a Kalman filter, which gives an efficient recursive method for Bayesian inference when the likelihood and prior are linear and gaussian. In off-line experiments, the Kalman filter reconstructions of hand trajectory were more accurate than previously reported results. The resulting decoding algorithm provides a principled probabilistic model of motor-cortical coding, decodes hand motion in real time, provides an estimate of uncertainty, and is straightforward to implement. Additionally the formulation unifies and extends previous models of neural coding while providing insights into the motor-cortical code.

pdf preprint pdf from publisher abstract [BibTex]

Wu, W., Gao, Y., Bienenstock, E., Donoghue, J. P., Black, M. J. Bayesian population decoding of motor cortical activity using a Kalman filter Neural Computation, 18(1):80-118, 2006 (article)

pdf preprint pdf from publisher abstract [BibTex]

Thumb xl screen shot 2012 06 06 at 11.15.02 am
Products of “Edge-perts”

Gehler, P., Welling, M.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 18, pages: 419-426, (Editors: Weiss, Y. and Sch"olkopf, B. and Platt, J.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006 (incollection)

pdf [BibTex]

Gehler, P., Welling, M. Products of “Edge-perts” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 18, pages: 419-426, (Editors: Weiss, Y. and Sch"olkopf, B. and Platt, J.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006 (incollection)

pdf [BibTex]

2000

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Probabilistic detection and tracking of motion boundaries

Black, M. J., Fleet, D. J.

Int. J. of Computer Vision, 38(3):231-245, July 2000 (article)

Abstract
We propose a Bayesian framework for representing and recognizing local image motion in terms of two basic models: translational motion and motion boundaries. Motion boundaries are represented using a non-linear generative model that explicitly encodes the orientation of the boundary, the velocities on either side, the motion of the occluding edge over time, and the appearance/disappearance of pixels at the boundary. We represent the posterior probability distribution over the model parameters given the image data using discrete samples. This distribution is propagated over time using a particle filtering algorithm. To efficiently represent such a high-dimensional space we initialize samples using the responses of a low-level motion discontinuity detector. The formulation and computational model provide a general probabilistic framework for motion estimation with multiple, non-linear, models.

pdf pdf from publisher Video [BibTex]

2000

Black, M. J., Fleet, D. J. Probabilistic detection and tracking of motion boundaries Int. J. of Computer Vision, 38(3):231-245, July 2000 (article)

pdf pdf from publisher Video [BibTex]

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Design and use of linear models for image motion analysis

Fleet, D. J., Black, M. J., Yacoob, Y., Jepson, A. D.

Int. J. of Computer Vision, 36(3):171-193, 2000 (article)

Abstract
Linear parameterized models of optical flow, particularly affine models, have become widespread in image motion analysis. The linear model coefficients are straightforward to estimate, and they provide reliable estimates of the optical flow of smooth surfaces. Here we explore the use of parameterized motion models that represent much more varied and complex motions. Our goals are threefold: to construct linear bases for complex motion phenomena; to estimate the coefficients of these linear models; and to recognize or classify image motions from the estimated coefficients. We consider two broad classes of motions: i) generic “motion features” such as motion discontinuities and moving bars; and ii) non-rigid, object-specific, motions such as the motion of human mouths. For motion features we construct a basis of steerable flow fields that approximate the motion features. For object-specific motions we construct basis flow fields from example motions using principal component analysis. In both cases, the model coefficients can be estimated directly from spatiotemporal image derivatives with a robust, multi-resolution scheme. Finally, we show how these model coefficients can be use to detect and recognize specific motions such as occlusion boundaries and facial expressions.

pdf [BibTex]

Fleet, D. J., Black, M. J., Yacoob, Y., Jepson, A. D. Design and use of linear models for image motion analysis Int. J. of Computer Vision, 36(3):171-193, 2000 (article)

pdf [BibTex]

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Robustly estimating changes in image appearance

Black, M. J., Fleet, D. J., Yacoob, Y.

Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 78(1):8-31, 2000 (article)

Abstract
We propose a generalized model of image “appearance change” in which brightness variation over time is represented as a probabilistic mixture of different causes. We define four generative models of appearance change due to (1) object or camera motion; (2) illumination phenomena; (3) specular reflections; and (4) “iconic changes” which are specific to the objects being viewed. These iconic changes include complex occlusion events and changes in the material properties of the objects. We develop a robust statistical framework for recovering these appearance changes in image sequences. This approach generalizes previous work on optical flow to provide a richer description of image events and more reliable estimates of image motion in the presence of shadows and specular reflections.

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Black, M. J., Fleet, D. J., Yacoob, Y. Robustly estimating changes in image appearance Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 78(1):8-31, 2000 (article)

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1996

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2012 12 07 um 11.52.07
Estimating optical flow in segmented images using variable-order parametric models with local deformations

Black, M. J., Jepson, A.

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 18(10):972-986, October 1996 (article)

Abstract
This paper presents a new model for estimating optical flow based on the motion of planar regions plus local deformations. The approach exploits brightness information to organize and constrain the interpretation of the motion by using segmented regions of piecewise smooth brightness to hypothesize planar regions in the scene. Parametric flow models are estimated in these regions in a two step process which first computes a coarse fit and estimates the appropriate parameterization of the motion of the region (two, six, or eight parameters). The initial fit is refined using a generalization of the standard area-based regression approaches. Since the assumption of planarity is likely to be violated, we allow local deformations from the planar assumption in the same spirit as physically-based approaches which model shape using coarse parametric models plus local deformations. This parametric+deformation model exploits the strong constraints of parametric approaches while retaining the adaptive nature of regularization approaches. Experimental results on a variety of images indicate that the parametric+deformation model produces accurate flow estimates while the incorporation of brightness segmentation provides precise localization of motion boundaries.

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1996

Black, M. J., Jepson, A. Estimating optical flow in segmented images using variable-order parametric models with local deformations IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 18(10):972-986, October 1996 (article)

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Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2012 12 07 um 11.59.00
On the unification of line processes, outlier rejection, and robust statistics with applications in early vision

Black, M., Rangarajan, A.

International Journal of Computer Vision , 19(1):57-92, July 1996 (article)

Abstract
The modeling of spatial discontinuities for problems such as surface recovery, segmentation, image reconstruction, and optical flow has been intensely studied in computer vision. While “line-process” models of discontinuities have received a great deal of attention, there has been recent interest in the use of robust statistical techniques to account for discontinuities. This paper unifies the two approaches. To achieve this we generalize the notion of a “line process” to that of an analog “outlier process” and show how a problem formulated in terms of outlier processes can be viewed in terms of robust statistics. We also characterize a class of robust statistical problems for which an equivalent outlier-process formulation exists and give a straightforward method for converting a robust estimation problem into an outlier-process formulation. We show how prior assumptions about the spatial structure of outliers can be expressed as constraints on the recovered analog outlier processes and how traditional continuation methods can be extended to the explicit outlier-process formulation. These results indicate that the outlier-process approach provides a general framework which subsumes the traditional line-process approaches as well as a wide class of robust estimation problems. Examples in surface reconstruction, image segmentation, and optical flow are presented to illustrate the use of outlier processes and to show how the relationship between outlier processes and robust statistics can be exploited. An appendix provides a catalog of common robust error norms and their equivalent outlier-process formulations.

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Mixture Models for Image Representation

Jepson, A., Black, M.

PRECARN ARK Project Technical Report ARK96-PUB-54, March 1996 (techreport)

Abstract
We consider the estimation of local greylevel image structure in terms of a layered representation. This type of representation has recently been successfully used to segment various objects from clutter using either optical ow or stereo disparity information. We argue that the same type of representation is useful for greylevel data in that it allows for the estimation of properties for each of several different components without prior segmentation. Our emphasis in this paper is on the process used to extract such a layered representation from a given image In particular we consider a variant of the EM algorithm for the estimation of the layered model and consider a novel technique for choosing the number of layers to use. We briefly consider the use of a simple version of this approach for image segmentation and suggest two potential applications to the ARK project

pdf [BibTex]

Jepson, A., Black, M. Mixture Models for Image Representation PRECARN ARK Project Technical Report ARK96-PUB-54, March 1996 (techreport)

pdf [BibTex]

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2012 12 07 um 12.09.01
The robust estimation of multiple motions: Parametric and piecewise-smooth flow fields

Black, M. J., Anandan, P.

Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 63(1):75-104, January 1996 (article)

Abstract
Most approaches for estimating optical flow assume that, within a finite image region, only a single motion is present. This single motion assumption is violated in common situations involving transparency, depth discontinuities, independently moving objects, shadows, and specular reflections. To robustly estimate optical flow, the single motion assumption must be relaxed. This paper presents a framework based on robust estimation that addresses violations of the brightness constancy and spatial smoothness assumptions caused by multiple motions. We show how the robust estimation framework can be applied to standard formulations of the optical flow problem thus reducing their sensitivity to violations of their underlying assumptions. The approach has been applied to three standard techniques for recovering optical flow: area-based regression, correlation, and regularization with motion discontinuities. This paper focuses on the recovery of multiple parametric motion models within a region, as well as the recovery of piecewise-smooth flow fields, and provides examples with natural and synthetic image sequences.

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Black, M. J., Anandan, P. The robust estimation of multiple motions: Parametric and piecewise-smooth flow fields Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 63(1):75-104, January 1996 (article)

pdf pdf from publisher [BibTex]