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43 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2019

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Attacking Optical Flow

Ranjan, A., Janai, J., Geiger, A., Black, M. J.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, November 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Deep neural nets achieve state-of-the-art performance on the problem of optical flow estimation. Since optical flow is used in several safety-critical applications like self-driving cars, it is important to gain insights into the robustness of those techniques. Recently, it has been shown that adversarial attacks easily fool deep neural networks to misclassify objects. The robustness of optical flow networks to adversarial attacks, however, has not been studied so far. In this paper, we extend adversarial patch attacks to optical flow networks and show that such attacks can compromise their performance. We show that corrupting a small patch of less than 1% of the image size can significantly affect optical flow estimates. Our attacks lead to noisy flow estimates that extend significantly beyond the region of the attack, in many cases even completely erasing the motion of objects in the scene. While networks using an encoder-decoder architecture are very sensitive to these attacks, we found that networks using a spatial pyramid architecture are less affected. We analyse the success and failure of attacking both architectures by visualizing their feature maps and comparing them to classical optical flow techniques which are robust to these attacks. We also demonstrate that such attacks are practical by placing a printed pattern into real scenes.

Video Project Page Paper Supplementary Material link (url) [BibTex]

2019

Ranjan, A., Janai, J., Geiger, A., Black, M. J. Attacking Optical Flow In International Conference on Computer Vision, November 2019 (inproceedings)

Video Project Page Paper Supplementary Material link (url) [BibTex]

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Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop

Kolotouros, N., Pavlakos, G., Black, M. J., Daniilidis, K.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Model-based human pose estimation is currently approached through two different paradigms. Optimization-based methods fit a parametric body model to 2D observations in an iterative manner, leading to accurate image-model alignments, but are often slow and sensitive to the initialization. In contrast, regression-based methods, that use a deep network to directly estimate the model parameters from pixels, tend to provide reasonable, but not pixel accurate, results while requiring huge amounts of supervision. In this work, instead of investigating which approach is better, our key insight is that the two paradigms can form a strong collaboration. A reasonable, directly regressed estimate from the network can initialize the iterative optimization making the fitting faster and more accurate. Similarly, a pixel accurate fit from iterative optimization can act as strong supervision for the network. This is the core of our proposed approach SPIN (SMPL oPtimization IN the loop). The deep network initializes an iterative optimization routine that fits the body model to 2D joints within the training loop, and the fitted estimate is subsequently used to supervise the network. Our approach is self-improving by nature, since better network estimates can lead the optimization to better solutions, while more accurate optimization fits provide better supervision for the network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in different settings, where 3D ground truth is scarce, or not available, and we consistently outperform the state-of-the-art model-based pose estimation approaches by significant margins.

pdf code project [BibTex]

Kolotouros, N., Pavlakos, G., Black, M. J., Daniilidis, K. Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings)

pdf code project [BibTex]

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Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints

Hassan, M., Choutas, V., Tzionas, D., Black, M. J.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
To understand and analyze human behavior, we need to capture humans moving in, and interacting with, the world. Most existing methods perform 3D human pose estimation without explicitly considering the scene. We observe however that the world constrains the body and vice-versa. To motivate this, we show that current 3D human pose estimation methods produce results that are not consistent with the 3D scene. Our key contribution is to exploit static 3D scene structure to better estimate human pose from monocular images. The method enforces Proximal Relationships with Object eXclusion and is called PROX. To test this, we collect a new dataset composed of 12 different 3D scenes and RGB sequences of 20 subjects moving in and interacting with the scenes. We represent human pose using the 3D human body model SMPL-X and extend SMPLify-X to estimate body pose using scene constraints. We make use of the 3D scene information by formulating two main constraints. The interpenetration constraint penalizes intersection between the body model and the surrounding 3D scene. The contact constraint encourages specific parts of the body to be in contact with scene surfaces if they are close enough in distance and orientation. For quantitative evaluation we capture a separate dataset with 180 RGB frames in which the ground-truth body pose is estimated using a motion-capture system. We show quantitatively that introducing scene constraints significantly reduces 3D joint error and vertex error. Our code and data are available for research at https://prox.is.tue.mpg.de.

pdf poster link (url) [BibTex]

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End-to-end Learning for Graph Decomposition

Song, J., Andres, B., Black, M., Hilliges, O., Tang, S.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Deep neural networks provide powerful tools for pattern recognition, while classical graph algorithms are widely used to solve combinatorial problems. In computer vision, many tasks combine elements of both pattern recognition and graph reasoning. In this paper, we study how to connect deep networks with graph decomposition into an end-to-end trainable framework. More specifically, the minimum cost multicut problem is first converted to an unconstrained binary cubic formulation where cycle consistency constraints are incorporated into the objective function. The new optimization problem can be viewed as a Conditional Random Field (CRF) in which the random variables are associated with the binary edge labels. Cycle constraints are introduced into the CRF as high-order potentials. A standard Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) provides the front-end features for the fully differentiable CRF. The parameters of both parts are optimized in an end-to-end manner. The efficacy of the proposed learning algorithm is demonstrated via experiments on clustering MNIST images and on the challenging task of real-world multi-people pose estimation.

PDF [BibTex]

Song, J., Andres, B., Black, M., Hilliges, O., Tang, S. End-to-end Learning for Graph Decomposition In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings)

PDF [BibTex]

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Three-D Safari: Learning to Estimate Zebra Pose, Shape, and Texture from Images "In the Wild"

Zuffi, S., Kanazawa, A., Berger-Wolf, T., Black, M. J.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We present the first method to perform automatic 3D pose, shape and texture capture of animals from images acquired in-the-wild. In particular, we focus on the problem of capturing 3D information about Grevy's zebras from a collection of images. The Grevy's zebra is one of the most endangered species in Africa, with only a few thousand individuals left. Capturing the shape and pose of these animals can provide biologists and conservationists with information about animal health and behavior. In contrast to research on human pose, shape and texture estimation, training data for endangered species is limited, the animals are in complex natural scenes with occlusion, they are naturally camouflaged, travel in herds, and look similar to each other. To overcome these challenges, we integrate the recent SMAL animal model into a network-based regression pipeline, which we train end-to-end on synthetically generated images with pose, shape, and background variation. Going beyond state-of-the-art methods for human shape and pose estimation, our method learns a shape space for zebras during training. Learning such a shape space from images using only a photometric loss is novel, and the approach can be used to learn shape in other settings with limited 3D supervision. Moreover, we couple 3D pose and shape prediction with the task of texture synthesis, obtaining a full texture map of the animal from a single image. We show that the predicted texture map allows a novel per-instance unsupervised optimization over the network features. This method, SMALST (SMAL with learned Shape and Texture) goes beyond previous work, which assumed manual keypoints and/or segmentation, to regress directly from pixels to 3D animal shape, pose and texture. Code and data are available at https://github.com/silviazuffi/smalst

code pdf supmat iccv19 presentation Project Page [BibTex]

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Efficient Learning on Point Clouds With Basis Point Sets

Prokudin, S., Lassner, C., Romero, J.

International Conference on Computer Vision, pages: 4332-4341, October 2019 (conference)

Abstract
With an increased availability of 3D scanning technology, point clouds are moving into the focus of computer vision as a rich representation of everyday scenes. However, they are hard to handle for machine learning algorithms due to the unordered structure. One common approach is to apply voxelization, which dramatically increases the amount of data stored and at the same time loses details through discretization. Recently, deep learning models with hand-tailored architectures were proposed to handle point clouds directly and achieve input permutation invariance. However, these architectures use an increased number of parameters and are computationally inefficient. In this work we propose basis point sets as a highly efficient and fully general way to process point clouds with machine learning algorithms. Basis point sets are a residual representation that can be computed efficiently and can be used with standard neural network architectures. Using the proposed representation as the input to a relatively simple network allows us to match the performance of PointNet on a shape classification task while using three order of magnitudes less floating point operations. In a second experiment, we show how proposed representation can be used for obtaining high resolution meshes from noisy 3D scans. Here, our network achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art computationally intense multi-step frameworks, in one network pass that can be done in less than 1ms.

[BibTex]

Prokudin, S., Lassner, C., Romero, J. Efficient Learning on Point Clouds With Basis Point Sets International Conference on Computer Vision, pages: 4332-4341, October 2019 (conference)

[BibTex]

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Markerless Outdoor Human Motion Capture Using Multiple Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles

Saini, N., Price, E., Tallamraju, R., Enficiaud, R., Ludwig, R., Martinović, I., Ahmad, A., Black, M.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings) Accepted

Abstract
Capturing human motion in natural scenarios means moving motion capture out of the lab and into the wild. Typical approaches rely on fixed, calibrated, cameras and reflective markers on the body, significantly limiting the motions that can be captured. To make motion capture truly unconstrained, we describe the first fully autonomous outdoor capture system based on flying vehicles. We use multiple micro-aerial-vehicles(MAVs), each equipped with a monocular RGB camera, an IMU, and a GPS receiver module. These detect the person, optimize their position, and localize themselves approximately. We then develop a markerless motion capture method that is suitable for this challenging scenario with a distant subject, viewed from above, with approximately calibrated and moving cameras. We combine multiple state-of-the-art 2D joint detectors with a 3D human body model and a powerful prior on human pose. We jointly optimize for 3D body pose and camera pose to robustly fit the 2D measurements. To our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of outdoor, full-body, markerless motion capture from autonomous flying vehicles.

Code Data Video Paper Manuscript Project Page [BibTex]

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AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes

Mahmood, N., Ghorbani, N., Troje, N. F., Pons-Moll, G., Black, M. J.

International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (conference)

Abstract
Large datasets are the cornerstone of recent advances in computer vision using deep learning. In contrast, existing human motion capture (mocap) datasets are small and the motions limited, hampering progress on learning models of human motion. While there are many different datasets available, they each use a different parameterization of the body, making it difficult to integrate them into a single meta dataset. To address this, we introduce AMASS, a large and varied database of human motion that unifies 15 different optical marker-based mocap datasets by representing them within a common framework and parameterization. We achieve this using a new method, MoSh++, that converts mocap data into realistic 3D human meshes represented by a rigged body model. Here we use SMPL [26], which is widely used and provides a standard skeletal representation as well as a fully rigged surface mesh. The method works for arbitrary marker-sets, while recovering soft-tissue dynamics and realistic hand motion. We evaluate MoSh++ and tune its hyper-parameters using a new dataset of 4D body scans that are jointly recorded with marker-based mocap. The consistent representation of AMASS makes it readily useful for animation, visualization, and generating training data for deep learning. Our dataset is significantly richer than previous human motion collections, having more than 40 hours of motion data, spanning over 300 subjects, more than 11000 motions, and is available for research at https://amass.is.tue.mpg.de/.

code pdf suppl arxiv project website video poster AMASS_Poster [BibTex]

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Learning to Train with Synthetic Humans

Hoffmann, D. T., Tzionas, D., Black, M. J., Tang, S.

In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), September 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Neural networks need big annotated datasets for training. However, manual annotation can be too expensive or even unfeasible for certain tasks, like multi-person 2D pose estimation with severe occlusions. A remedy for this is synthetic data with perfect ground truth. Here we explore two variations of synthetic data for this challenging problem; a dataset with purely synthetic humans, as well as a real dataset augmented with synthetic humans. We then study which approach better generalizes to real data, as well as the influence of virtual humans in the training loss. We observe that not all synthetic samples are equally informative for training, while the informative samples are different for each training stage. To exploit this observation, we employ an adversarial student-teacher framework; the teacher improves the student by providing the hardest samples for its current state as a challenge. Experiments show that this student-teacher framework outperforms all our baselines.

pdf suppl poster link (url) [BibTex]

Hoffmann, D. T., Tzionas, D., Black, M. J., Tang, S. Learning to Train with Synthetic Humans In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), September 2019 (inproceedings)

pdf suppl poster link (url) [BibTex]

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The Influence of Visual Perspective on Body Size Estimation in Immersive Virtual Reality

Thaler, A., Pujades, S., Stefanucci, J. K., Creem-Regehr, S. H., Tesch, J., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J.

In ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, September 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
The creation of realistic self-avatars that users identify with is important for many virtual reality applications. However, current approaches for creating biometrically plausible avatars that represent a particular individual require expertise and are time-consuming. We investigated the visual perception of an avatar’s body dimensions by asking males and females to estimate their own body weight and shape on a virtual body using a virtual reality avatar creation tool. In a method of adjustment task, the virtual body was presented in an HTC Vive head-mounted display either co-located with (first-person perspective) or facing (third-person perspective) the participants. Participants adjusted the body weight and dimensions of various body parts to match their own body shape and size. Both males and females underestimated their weight by 10-20% in the virtual body, but the estimates of the other body dimensions were relatively accurate and within a range of ±6%. There was a stronger influence of visual perspective on the estimates for males, but this effect was dependent on the amount of control over the shape of the virtual body, indicating that the results might be caused by where in the body the weight changes expressed themselves. These results suggest that this avatar creation tool could be used to allow participants to make a relatively accurate self-avatar in terms of adjusting body part dimensions, but not weight, and that the influence of visual perspective and amount of control needed over the body shape are likely gender-specific.

pdf [BibTex]

Thaler, A., Pujades, S., Stefanucci, J. K., Creem-Regehr, S. H., Tesch, J., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J. The Influence of Visual Perspective on Body Size Estimation in Immersive Virtual Reality In ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, September 2019 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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Motion Planning for Multi-Mobile-Manipulator Payload Transport Systems

Tallamraju, R., Salunkhe, D., Rajappa, S., Ahmad, A., Karlapalem, K., Shah, S. V.

In 15th IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, IEEE, August 2019 (inproceedings) Accepted

[BibTex]

Tallamraju, R., Salunkhe, D., Rajappa, S., Ahmad, A., Karlapalem, K., Shah, S. V. Motion Planning for Multi-Mobile-Manipulator Payload Transport Systems In 15th IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, IEEE, August 2019 (inproceedings) Accepted

[BibTex]

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Competitive Collaboration: Joint Unsupervised Learning of Depth, Camera Motion, Optical Flow and Motion Segmentation

Ranjan, A., Jampani, V., Balles, L., Kim, K., Sun, D., Wulff, J., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We address the unsupervised learning of several interconnected problems in low-level vision: single view depth prediction, camera motion estimation, optical flow, and segmentation of a video into the static scene and moving regions. Our key insight is that these four fundamental vision problems are coupled through geometric constraints. Consequently, learning to solve them together simplifies the problem because the solutions can reinforce each other. We go beyond previous work by exploiting geometry more explicitly and segmenting the scene into static and moving regions. To that end, we introduce Competitive Collaboration, a framework that facilitates the coordinated training of multiple specialized neural networks to solve complex problems. Competitive Collaboration works much like expectation-maximization, but with neural networks that act as both competitors to explain pixels that correspond to static or moving regions, and as collaborators through a moderator that assigns pixels to be either static or independently moving. Our novel method integrates all these problems in a common framework and simultaneously reasons about the segmentation of the scene into moving objects and the static background, the camera motion, depth of the static scene structure, and the optical flow of moving objects. Our model is trained without any supervision and achieves state-of-the-art performance among joint unsupervised methods on all sub-problems.

Paper link (url) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Local Temporal Bilinear Pooling for Fine-grained Action Parsing

Zhang, Y., Tang, S., Muandet, K., Jarvers, C., Neumann, H.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Fine-grained temporal action parsing is important in many applications, such as daily activity understanding, human motion analysis, surgical robotics and others requiring subtle and precise operations in a long-term period. In this paper we propose a novel bilinear pooling operation, which is used in intermediate layers of a temporal convolutional encoder-decoder net. In contrast to other work, our proposed bilinear pooling is learnable and hence can capture more complex local statistics than the conventional counterpart. In addition, we introduce exact lower-dimension representations of our bilinear forms, so that the dimensionality is reduced with neither information loss nor extra computation. We perform intensive experiments to quantitatively analyze our model and show the superior performances to other state-of-the-art work on various datasets.

Code video demo pdf link (url) [BibTex]

Zhang, Y., Tang, S., Muandet, K., Jarvers, C., Neumann, H. Local Temporal Bilinear Pooling for Fine-grained Action Parsing In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Code video demo pdf link (url) [BibTex]

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Learning to Regress 3D Face Shape and Expression from an Image without 3D Supervision

Sanyal, S., Bolkart, T., Feng, H., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
The estimation of 3D face shape from a single image must be robust to variations in lighting, head pose, expression, facial hair, makeup, and occlusions. Robustness requires a large training set of in-the-wild images, which by construction, lack ground truth 3D shape. To train a network without any 2D-to-3D supervision, we present RingNet, which learns to compute 3D face shape from a single image. Our key observation is that an individual’s face shape is constant across images, regardless of expression, pose, lighting, etc. RingNet leverages multiple images of a person and automatically detected 2D face features. It uses a novel loss that encourages the face shape to be similar when the identity is the same and different for different people. We achieve invariance to expression by representing the face using the FLAME model. Once trained, our method takes a single image and outputs the parameters of FLAME, which can be readily animated. Additionally we create a new database of faces “not quite in-the-wild” (NoW) with 3D head scans and high-resolution images of the subjects in a wide variety of conditions. We evaluate publicly available methods and find that RingNet is more accurate than methods that use 3D supervision. The dataset, model, and results are available for research purposes.

code pdf preprint link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

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Learning Joint Reconstruction of Hands and Manipulated Objects

Hasson, Y., Varol, G., Tzionas, D., Kalevatykh, I., Black, M. J., Laptev, I., Schmid, C.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Estimating hand-object manipulations is essential for interpreting and imitating human actions. Previous work has made significant progress towards reconstruction of hand poses and object shapes in isolation. Yet, reconstructing hands and objects during manipulation is a more challenging task due to significant occlusions of both the hand and object. While presenting challenges, manipulations may also simplify the problem since the physics of contact restricts the space of valid hand-object configurations. For example, during manipulation, the hand and object should be in contact but not interpenetrate. In this work, we regularize the joint reconstruction of hands and objects with manipulation constraints. We present an end-to-end learnable model that exploits a novel contact loss that favors physically plausible hand-object constellations. Our approach improves grasp quality metrics over baselines, using RGB images as input. To train and evaluate the model, we also propose a new large-scale synthetic dataset, ObMan, with hand-object manipulations. We demonstrate the transferability of ObMan-trained models to real data.

pdf suppl poster link (url) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Hasson, Y., Varol, G., Tzionas, D., Kalevatykh, I., Black, M. J., Laptev, I., Schmid, C. Learning Joint Reconstruction of Hands and Manipulated Objects In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

pdf suppl poster link (url) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image

Pavlakos, G., Choutas, V., Ghorbani, N., Bolkart, T., Osman, A. A. A., Tzionas, D., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
To facilitate the analysis of human actions, interactions and emotions, we compute a 3D model of human body pose, hand pose, and facial expression from a single monocular image. To achieve this, we use thousands of 3D scans to train a new, unified, 3D model of the human body, SMPL-X, that extends SMPL with fully articulated hands and an expressive face. Learning to regress the parameters of SMPL-X directly from images is challenging without paired images and 3D ground truth. Consequently, we follow the approach of SMPLify, which estimates 2D features and then optimizes model parameters to fit the features. We improve on SMPLify in several significant ways: (1) we detect 2D features corresponding to the face, hands, and feet and fit the full SMPL-X model to these; (2) we train a new neural network pose prior using a large MoCap dataset; (3) we define a new interpenetration penalty that is both fast and accurate; (4) we automatically detect gender and the appropriate body models (male, female, or neutral); (5) our PyTorch implementation achieves a speedup of more than 8x over Chumpy. We use the new method, SMPLify-X, to fit SMPL-X to both controlled images and images in the wild. We evaluate 3D accuracy on a new curated dataset comprising 100 images with pseudo ground-truth. This is a step towards automatic expressive human capture from monocular RGB data. The models, code, and data are available for research purposes at https://smpl-x.is.tue.mpg.de.

video code pdf suppl poster link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

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Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles

Cudeiro, D., Bolkart, T., Laidlaw, C., Ranjan, A., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Audio-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, but achieving realistic, human-like performance is still unsolved. This is due to the lack of available 3D datasets, models, and standard evaluation metrics. To address this, we introduce a unique 4D face dataset with about 29 minutes of 4D scans captured at 60 fps and synchronized audio from 12 speakers. We then train a neural network on our dataset that factors identity from facial motion. The learned model, VOCA (Voice Operated Character Animation) takes any speech signal as input—even speech in languages other than English—and realistically animates a wide range of adult faces. Conditioning on subject labels during training allows the model to learn a variety of realistic speaking styles. VOCA also provides animator controls to alter speaking style, identity-dependent facial shape, and pose (i.e. head, jaw, and eyeball rotations) during animation. To our knowledge, VOCA is the only realistic 3D facial animation model that is readily applicable to unseen subjects without retargeting. This makes VOCA suitable for tasks like in-game video, virtual reality avatars, or any scenario in which the speaker, speech, or language is not known in advance. We make the dataset and model available for research purposes at http://voca.is.tue.mpg.de.

code Project Page video paper [BibTex]

Cudeiro, D., Bolkart, T., Laidlaw, C., Ranjan, A., Black, M. J. Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

code Project Page video paper [BibTex]

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Resisting Adversarial Attacks using Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders

Ghosh, P., Losalka, A., Black, M. J.

In Proc. AAAI, 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Susceptibility of deep neural networks to adversarial attacks poses a major theoretical and practical challenge. All efforts to harden classifiers against such attacks have seen limited success till now. Two distinct categories of samples against which deep neural networks are vulnerable, ``adversarial samples" and ``fooling samples", have been tackled separately so far due to the difficulty posed when considered together. In this work, we show how one can defend against them both under a unified framework. Our model has the form of a variational autoencoder with a Gaussian mixture prior on the latent variable, such that each mixture component corresponds to a single class. We show how selective classification can be performed using this model, thereby causing the adversarial objective to entail a conflict. The proposed method leads to the rejection of adversarial samples instead of misclassification, while maintaining high precision and recall on test data. It also inherently provides a way of learning a selective classifier in a semi-supervised scenario, which can similarly resist adversarial attacks. We further show how one can reclassify the detected adversarial samples by iterative optimization.

link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

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From Variational to Deterministic Autoencoders

Ghosh*, P., Sajjadi*, M. S. M., Vergari, A., Black, M. J., Schölkopf, B.

2019, *equal contribution (conference) Submitted

Abstract
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) provide a theoretically-backed framework for deep generative models. However, they often produce “blurry” images, which is linked to their training objective. Sampling in the most popular implementation, the Gaussian VAE, can be interpreted as simply injecting noise to the input of a deterministic decoder. In practice, this simply enforces a smooth latent space structure. We challenge the adoption of the full VAE framework on this specific point in favor of a simpler, deterministic one. Specifically, we investigate how substituting stochasticity with other explicit and implicit regularization schemes can lead to a meaningful latent space without having to force it to conform to an arbitrarily chosen prior. To retrieve a generative mechanism for sampling new data points, we propose to employ an efficient ex-post density estimation step that can be readily adopted both for the proposed deterministic autoencoders as well as to improve sample quality of existing VAEs. We show in a rigorous empirical study that regularized deterministic autoencoding achieves state-of-the-art sample quality on the common MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CelebA datasets.

arXiv [BibTex]

2005

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A quantitative evaluation of video-based 3D person tracking

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

In The Second Joint IEEE International Workshop on Visual Surveillance and Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance, VS-PETS, pages: 349-356, October 2005 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

2005

Balan, A. O., Sigal, L., Black, M. J. A quantitative evaluation of video-based 3D person tracking In The Second Joint IEEE International Workshop on Visual Surveillance and Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance, VS-PETS, pages: 349-356, October 2005 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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Inferring attentional state and kinematics from motor cortical firing rates

Wood, F., Prabhat, , Donoghue, J. P., Black, M. J.

In Proc. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, pages: 1544-1547, September 2005 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Wood, F., Prabhat, , Donoghue, J. P., Black, M. J. Inferring attentional state and kinematics from motor cortical firing rates In Proc. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, pages: 1544-1547, September 2005 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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Motor cortical decoding using an autoregressive moving average model

Fisher, J., Black, M. J.

In Proc. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, pages: 1469-1472, September 2005 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Fisher, J., Black, M. J. Motor cortical decoding using an autoregressive moving average model In Proc. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, pages: 1469-1472, September 2005 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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Fields of Experts: A framework for learning image priors

Roth, S., Black, M. J.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2, pages: 860-867, June 2005 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Roth, S., Black, M. J. Fields of Experts: A framework for learning image priors In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2, pages: 860-867, June 2005 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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On the spatial statistics of optical flow

(Marr Prize, Honorable Mention)

Roth, S., Black, M. J.

In International Conf. on Computer Vision, International Conf. on Computer Vision, pages: 42-49, 2005 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Roth, S., Black, M. J. On the spatial statistics of optical flow In International Conf. on Computer Vision, International Conf. on Computer Vision, pages: 42-49, 2005 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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Modeling neural population spiking activity with Gibbs distributions

Wood, F., Roth, S., Black, M. J.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 18, pages: 1537-1544, 2005 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Wood, F., Roth, S., Black, M. J. Modeling neural population spiking activity with Gibbs distributions In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 18, pages: 1537-1544, 2005 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

no image
Energy-based models of motor cortical population activity

Wood, F., Black, M.

Program No. 689.20. 2005 Abstract Viewer/Itinerary Planner, Society for Neuroscience, Washington, DC, 2005 (conference)

abstract [BibTex]

Wood, F., Black, M. Energy-based models of motor cortical population activity Program No. 689.20. 2005 Abstract Viewer/Itinerary Planner, Society for Neuroscience, Washington, DC, 2005 (conference)

abstract [BibTex]

2001

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2012 12 11 um 10.41.35
Dynamic coupled component analysis

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

In IEEE Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR’01, 2, pages: 643-650, IEEE, Kauai, Hawaii, December 2001 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

2001

De la Torre, F., Black, M. J. Dynamic coupled component analysis In IEEE Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR’01, 2, pages: 643-650, IEEE, Kauai, Hawaii, December 2001 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2012 12 11 um 11.56.46
Robust principal component analysis for computer vision

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

In Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, ICCV-2001, II, pages: 362-369, Vancouver, BC, USA, 2001 (inproceedings)

pdf Project Page [BibTex]

De la Torre, F., Black, M. J. Robust principal component analysis for computer vision In Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, ICCV-2001, II, pages: 362-369, Vancouver, BC, USA, 2001 (inproceedings)

pdf Project Page [BibTex]

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2012 12 11 um 10.58.16
Learning image statistics for Bayesian tracking

Sidenbladh, H., Black, M. J.

In Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, ICCV-2001, II, pages: 709-716, Vancouver, BC, USA, 2001 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Sidenbladh, H., Black, M. J. Learning image statistics for Bayesian tracking In Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, ICCV-2001, II, pages: 709-716, Vancouver, BC, USA, 2001 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

no image
Encoding/decoding of arm kinematics from simultaneously recorded MI neurons

Gao, Y., Bienenstock, E., Black, M., Shoham, S., Serruya, M., Donoghue, J.

Society for Neuroscience Abst. Vol. 27, Program No. 572.14, 2001 (conference)

abstract [BibTex]

Gao, Y., Bienenstock, E., Black, M., Shoham, S., Serruya, M., Donoghue, J. Encoding/decoding of arm kinematics from simultaneously recorded MI neurons Society for Neuroscience Abst. Vol. 27, Program No. 572.14, 2001 (conference)

abstract [BibTex]

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2012 12 11 um 12.05.35
Learning and tracking cyclic human motion

Ormoneit, D., Sidenbladh, H., Black, M. J., Hastie, T.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 13, NIPS, pages: 894-900, (Editors: Leen, Todd K. and Dietterich, Thomas G. and Tresp, Volker), The MIT Press, 2001 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Ormoneit, D., Sidenbladh, H., Black, M. J., Hastie, T. Learning and tracking cyclic human motion In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 13, NIPS, pages: 894-900, (Editors: Leen, Todd K. and Dietterich, Thomas G. and Tresp, Volker), The MIT Press, 2001 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

1999

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2013 01 14 um 09.07.06
Edges as outliers: Anisotropic smoothing using local image statistics

Black, M. J., Sapiro, G.

In Scale-Space Theories in Computer Vision, Second Int. Conf., Scale-Space ’99, pages: 259-270, LNCS 1682, Springer, Corfu, Greece, September 1999 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Edges are viewed as statistical outliers with respect to local image gradient magnitudes. Within local image regions we compute a robust statistical measure of the gradient variation and use this in an anisotropic diffusion framework to determine a spatially varying "edge-stopping" parameter σ. We show how to determine this parameter for two edge-stopping functions described in the literature (Perona-Malik and the Tukey biweight). Smoothing of the image is related the local texture and in regions of low texture, small gradient values may be treated as edges whereas in regions of high texture, large gradient magnitudes are necessary before an edge is preserved. Intuitively these results have similarities with human perceptual phenomena such as masking and "popout". Results are shown on a variety of standard images.

pdf [BibTex]

1999

Black, M. J., Sapiro, G. Edges as outliers: Anisotropic smoothing using local image statistics In Scale-Space Theories in Computer Vision, Second Int. Conf., Scale-Space ’99, pages: 259-270, LNCS 1682, Springer, Corfu, Greece, September 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2013 01 07 um 12.35.15
Probabilistic detection and tracking of motion discontinuities

(Marr Prize, Honorable Mention)

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

In Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, ICCV-99, pages: 551-558, ICCV, Corfu, Greece, September 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Black, M. J., Fleet, D. J. Probabilistic detection and tracking of motion discontinuities In Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, ICCV-99, pages: 551-558, ICCV, Corfu, Greece, September 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2013 01 14 um 09.12.47
Explaining optical flow events with parameterized spatio-temporal models

Black, M. J.

In IEEE Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR’99, pages: 326-332, IEEE, Fort Collins, CO, 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf video [BibTex]

Black, M. J. Explaining optical flow events with parameterized spatio-temporal models In IEEE Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR’99, pages: 326-332, IEEE, Fort Collins, CO, 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf video [BibTex]

1997

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Robust anisotropic diffusion and sharpening of scalar and vector images

Black, M. J., Sapiro, G., Marimont, D., Heeger, D.

In Int. Conf. on Image Processing, ICIP, 1, pages: 263-266, Vol. 1, Santa Barbara, CA, October 1997 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Relations between anisotropic diffusion and robust statistics are described. We show that anisotropic diffusion can be seen as a robust estimation procedure that estimates a piecewise smooth image from a noisy input image. The "edge-stopping" function in the anisotropic diffusion equation is closely related to the error norm and influence function in the robust estimation framework. This connection leads to a new "edge-stopping" function based on Tukey's biweight robust estimator, that preserves sharper boundaries than previous formulations and improves the automatic stopping of the diffusion. The robust statistical interpretation also provides a means for detecting the boundaries (edges) between the piecewise smooth regions in the image. We extend the framework to vector-valued images and show applications to robust image sharpening.

pdf publisher site [BibTex]

1997

Black, M. J., Sapiro, G., Marimont, D., Heeger, D. Robust anisotropic diffusion and sharpening of scalar and vector images In Int. Conf. on Image Processing, ICIP, 1, pages: 263-266, Vol. 1, Santa Barbara, CA, October 1997 (inproceedings)

pdf publisher site [BibTex]

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2013 01 14 um 10.31.38
Robust anisotropic diffusion: Connections between robust statistics, line processing, and anisotropic diffusion

Black, M. J., Sapiro, G., Marimont, D., Heeger, D.

In Scale-Space Theory in Computer Vision, Scale-Space’97, pages: 323-326, LNCS 1252, Springer Verlag, Utrecht, the Netherlands, July 1997 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Black, M. J., Sapiro, G., Marimont, D., Heeger, D. Robust anisotropic diffusion: Connections between robust statistics, line processing, and anisotropic diffusion In Scale-Space Theory in Computer Vision, Scale-Space’97, pages: 323-326, LNCS 1252, Springer Verlag, Utrecht, the Netherlands, July 1997 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2013 01 14 um 10.05.56
Learning parameterized models of image motion

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

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR-97, pages: 561-567, Puerto Rico, June 1997 (inproceedings)

Abstract
A framework for learning parameterized models of optical flow from image sequences is presented. A class of motions is represented by a set of orthogonal basis flow fields that are computed from a training set using principal component analysis. Many complex image motions can be represented by a linear combination of a small number of these basis flows. The learned motion models may be used for optical flow estimation and for model-based recognition. For optical flow estimation we describe a robust, multi-resolution scheme for directly computing the parameters of the learned flow models from image derivatives. As examples we consider learning motion discontinuities, non-rigid motion of human mouths, and articulated human motion.

pdf [BibTex]

Black, M. J., Yacoob, Y., Jepson, A. D., Fleet, D. J. Learning parameterized models of image motion In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR-97, pages: 561-567, Puerto Rico, June 1997 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2013 01 14 um 10.13.51
Analysis of gesture and action in technical talks for video indexing

Ju, S. X., Black, M. J., Minneman, S., Kimber, D.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages: 595-601, CVPR-97, Puerto Rico, June 1997 (inproceedings)

Abstract
In this paper, we present an automatic system for analyzing and annotating video sequences of technical talks. Our method uses a robust motion estimation technique to detect key frames and segment the video sequence into subsequences containing a single overhead slide. The subsequences are stabilized to remove motion that occurs when the speaker adjusts their slides. Any changes remaining between frames in the stabilized sequences may be due to speaker gestures such as pointing or writing and we use active contours to automatically track these potential gestures. Given the constrained domain we define a simple ``vocabulary'' of actions which can easily be recognized based on the active contour shape and motion. The recognized actions provide a rich annotation of the sequence that can be used to access a condensed version of the talk from a web page.

pdf [BibTex]

Ju, S. X., Black, M. J., Minneman, S., Kimber, D. Analysis of gesture and action in technical talks for video indexing In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pages: 595-601, CVPR-97, Puerto Rico, June 1997 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2013 01 14 um 10.36.36
Modeling appearance change in image sequences

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

In Advances in Visual Form Analysis, pages: 11-20, Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Visual Form, Capri, Italy, May 1997 (inproceedings)

abstract [BibTex]

Black, M. J., Yacoob, Y., Fleet, D. J. Modeling appearance change in image sequences In Advances in Visual Form Analysis, pages: 11-20, Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Visual Form, Capri, Italy, May 1997 (inproceedings)

abstract [BibTex]

1993

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2013 01 14 um 11.48.36
Mixture models for optical flow computation

Jepson, A., Black, M.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR-93, pages: 760-761, New York, NY, June 1993 (inproceedings)

pdf abstract tech report [BibTex]

1993

Jepson, A., Black, M. Mixture models for optical flow computation In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR-93, pages: 760-761, New York, NY, June 1993 (inproceedings)

pdf abstract tech report [BibTex]

Thumb xl bildschirmfoto 2013 01 14 um 11.52.45
A framework for the robust estimation of optical flow

(Helmholtz Prize)

Black, M. J., Anandan, P.

In Fourth International Conf. on Computer Vision, ICCV-93, pages: 231-236, Berlin, Germany, May 1993 (inproceedings)

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 work describes 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 work 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.

pdf video abstract code [BibTex]

Black, M. J., Anandan, P. A framework for the robust estimation of optical flow In Fourth International Conf. on Computer Vision, ICCV-93, pages: 231-236, Berlin, Germany, May 1993 (inproceedings)

pdf video abstract code [BibTex]

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Action, representation, and purpose: Re-evaluating the foundations of computational vision

Black, M. J., Aloimonos, Y., Brown, C. M., Horswill, I., Malik, J., G. Sandini, , Tarr, M. J.

In International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-93, pages: 1661-1666, Chambery, France, 1993 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Black, M. J., Aloimonos, Y., Brown, C. M., Horswill, I., Malik, J., G. Sandini, , Tarr, M. J. Action, representation, and purpose: Re-evaluating the foundations of computational vision In International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-93, pages: 1661-1666, Chambery, France, 1993 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]