Hands in Action | Perceiving Systems - Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

We collect 3D scans of human hands (left) from multiple people and model pose and shape variation across people and poses by learning a statistical model of the human hand, called MANO. We then combine the MANO hand model with our SMPL body model to build a holistic model called SMPL+H. The figure (right) shows example 3D scans (white) from our 4D sequences and corresponding fits of SMPL+H to these scans (pink). SMPL+H is able to capture natural motions even under challenging conditions, such as severe missing data due to fast motion, occlusion, finger-webbing, or noise.

Dimitrios Tzionas (Project Leader), Javier Romero, Michael Black (Director), Gul Varol, Cordelia Schmid, Yana Hasson (INRIA), Igor Kalevatykh (INRIA), Ivan Laptev (INRIA)

Hands are important to humans for signaling and communication, as well as for interacting with the physical world. Capturing the motion of hands is a very challenging computer vision problem that is also highly relevant for other areas like computer graphics, human-computer interfaces, and robotics.

We focus on building an accurate and realistic model of the human hand [ ] that captures the pose and shape variation across a human population. For this we collect many examples of human hands with our 3D scanner, following a systematic grasp taxonomy [ ]. We then combine the hand model with our SMPL body model to build a seamless model of the body together with hands, called SMPL+H. This allows us to naturally capture the motion of people with expressive body and hand motion using our 4D scanner.

A strong hand model can be used to regularize fitting to noisy input data to reconstruct hands and/or objects [ ]. We focus on hands that interact with other hands or known objects [ ], using either a single RGB-D camera or multiple synchronized RGB cameras. Interaction cues can also reveal information that helps to reconstruct unknown properties of the object, like the kinematic skeleton [ ].

Our current work focuses on estimating hands performing tasks from a single image or video. We use our hand model to generate synthetic training data of hand-object interaction and use deep learning to reconstruct hand-object configurations jointly from a single RGB image. By estimating the 3D hand and object shape together, we are able to reason about interactions such as proximity, contact, grasp stability, and forces while preventing interpenetration.

In collaboration with the Haptic Intelligence department we are extending our hand capture and modeling to account for the soft tissue deformation of the hand during contact and manipulation [ ]. This is critical for realistic physical reasoning about grasp.

SIGGRAPH-Asia 2017 (TOG) models/dataset (link)

Models & Alignments & Scans, for:
- hand-only (MANO)
- body+hand (SMPL+H)

ECCVw 2016 dataset (link)

RGB-D dataset of an object under manipulation.
The dataset also contains input 3D template meshes
for each object and output articulated models.

IJCV 2016 dataset (link)

Annotated RGB-D + multicamera-RGB dataset of one or two hands
interacting with each other and/or with a rigid or an articulated object

ICCV 2015 dataset (link)

RGB-D dataset of a hand rotating a rigid object for 3d scanning

GCPR 2014 dataset (link)

Annotated RGB-D dataset of one or two hands interacting with each other

GCPR 2013 dataset (link)

Synthetic dataset of two hands interacting with each other

Dimitrios Tzionas (Project leader)

Research Scientist

Javier Romero

Michael Black

Director

Gul Varol

Ph.D. Student

Cordelia Schmid

Guest Scientist

Yana Hasson

INRIA

Igor Kalevatykh

INRIA

Ivan Laptev

INRIA

11 results

2019

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 link (url) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

2019

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 link (url) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

2017

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]

2017

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]

Capturing Hand-Object Interaction and Reconstruction of Manipulated Objects

Tzionas, D.

University of Bonn, 2017 (phdthesis)

Abstract

Hand motion capture with an RGB-D sensor gained recently a lot of research attention, however, even most recent approaches focus on the case of a single isolated hand. We focus instead on hands that interact with other hands or with a rigid or articulated object. Our framework successfully captures motion in such scenarios by combining a generative model with discriminatively trained salient points, collision detection and physics simulation to achieve a low tracking error with physically plausible poses. All components are unified in a single objective function that can be optimized with standard optimization techniques. We initially assume a-priori knowledge of the object's shape and skeleton. In case of unknown object shape there are existing 3d reconstruction methods that capitalize on distinctive geometric or texture features. These methods though fail for textureless and highly symmetric objects like household articles, mechanical parts or toys. We show that extracting 3d hand motion for in-hand scanning effectively facilitates the reconstruction of such objects and we fuse the rich additional information of hands into a 3d reconstruction pipeline. Finally, although shape reconstruction is enough for rigid objects, there is a lack of tools that build rigged models of articulated objects that deform realistically using RGB-D data. We propose a method that creates a fully rigged model consisting of a watertight mesh, embedded skeleton and skinning weights by employing a combination of deformable mesh tracking, motion segmentation based on spectral clustering and skeletonization based on mean curvature flow.

Thesis link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

Tzionas, D. Capturing Hand-Object Interaction and Reconstruction of Manipulated Objects University of Bonn, 2017 (phdthesis)

Thesis link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

2016

The GRASP Taxonomy of Human Grasp Types

Feix, T., Romero, J., Schmiedmayer, H., Dollar, A., Kragic, D.

Human-Machine Systems, IEEE Transactions on, 46(1):66-77, 2016 (article)

publisher website pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

2016

Feix, T., Romero, J., Schmiedmayer, H., Dollar, A., Kragic, D. The GRASP Taxonomy of Human Grasp Types Human-Machine Systems, IEEE Transactions on, 46(1):66-77, 2016 (article)

publisher website pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Capturing Hands in Action using Discriminative Salient Points and Physics Simulation

Tzionas, D., Ballan, L., Srikantha, A., Aponte, P., Pollefeys, M., Gall, J.

International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 118(2):172-193, June 2016 (article)

Abstract

Hand motion capture is a popular research field, recently gaining more attention due to the ubiquity of RGB-D sensors. However, even most recent approaches focus on the case of a single isolated hand. In this work, we focus on hands that interact with other hands or objects and present a framework that successfully captures motion in such interaction scenarios for both rigid and articulated objects. Our framework combines a generative model with discriminatively trained salient points to achieve a low tracking error and with collision detection and physics simulation to achieve physically plausible estimates even in case of occlusions and missing visual data. Since all components are unified in a single objective function which is almost everywhere differentiable, it can be optimized with standard optimization techniques. Our approach works for monocular RGB-D sequences as well as setups with multiple synchronized RGB cameras. For a qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we captured 29 sequences with a large variety of interactions and up to 150 degrees of freedom.

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

Tzionas, D., Ballan, L., Srikantha, A., Aponte, P., Pollefeys, M., Gall, J. Capturing Hands in Action using Discriminative Salient Points and Physics Simulation International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 118(2):172-193, June 2016 (article)

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

2015

3D Object Reconstruction from Hand-Object Interactions

Tzionas, D., Gall, J.

In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 729-737, December 2015 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Recent advances have enabled 3d object reconstruction approaches using a single off-the-shelf RGB-D camera. Although these approaches are successful for a wide range of object classes, they rely on stable and distinctive geometric or texture features. Many objects like mechanical parts, toys, household or decorative articles, however, are textureless and characterized by minimalistic shapes that are simple and symmetric. Existing in-hand scanning systems and 3d reconstruction techniques fail for such symmetric objects in the absence of highly distinctive features. In this work, we show that extracting 3d hand motion for in-hand scanning effectively facilitates the reconstruction of even featureless and highly symmetric objects and we present an approach that fuses the rich additional information of hands into a 3d reconstruction pipeline, significantly contributing to the state-of-the-art of in-hand scanning.

pdf Project's Website Video Spotlight Extended Abstract YouTube DOI Project Page [BibTex]

2015

Tzionas, D., Gall, J. 3D Object Reconstruction from Hand-Object Interactions In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pages: 729-737, December 2015 (inproceedings)

pdf Project's Website Video Spotlight Extended Abstract YouTube DOI Project Page [BibTex]

2014

Capturing Hand Motion with an RGB-D Sensor, Fusing a Generative Model with Salient Points

Tzionas, D., Srikantha, A., Aponte, P., Gall, J.

In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), pages: 1-13, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, September 2014 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Hand motion capture has been an active research topic in recent years, following the success of full-body pose tracking. Despite similarities, hand tracking proves to be more challenging, characterized by a higher dimensionality, severe occlusions and self-similarity between fingers. For this reason, most approaches rely on strong assumptions, like hands in isolation or expensive multi-camera systems, that limit the practical use. In this work, we propose a framework for hand tracking that can capture the motion of two interacting hands using only a single, inexpensive RGB-D camera. Our approach combines a generative model with collision detection and discriminatively learned salient points. We quantitatively evaluate our approach on 14 new sequences with challenging interactions.

pdf Supplementary pdf Supplementary Material Project Page DOI Project Page [BibTex]

2014

Tzionas, D., Srikantha, A., Aponte, P., Gall, J. Capturing Hand Motion with an RGB-D Sensor, Fusing a Generative Model with Salient Points In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), pages: 1-13, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, September 2014 (inproceedings)

pdf Supplementary pdf Supplementary Material Project Page DOI Project Page [BibTex]

2013

A Comparison of Directional Distances for Hand Pose Estimation

Tzionas, D., Gall, J.

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

Abstract

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

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

2013

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

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

2012

Motion Capture of Hands in Action using Discriminative Salient Points

Ballan, L., Taneja, A., Gall, J., van Gool, L., Pollefeys, M.

In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 7577, pages: 640-653, LNCS, Springer, 2012 (inproceedings)

data video pdf supplementary Project Page [BibTex]

2012

Ballan, L., Taneja, A., Gall, J., van Gool, L., Pollefeys, M. Motion Capture of Hands in Action using Discriminative Salient Points In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 7577, pages: 640-653, LNCS, Springer, 2012 (inproceedings)

data video pdf supplementary Project Page [BibTex]

2010

Spatio-Temporal Modeling of Grasping Actions

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

In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS, pages: 2103-2108, 2010 (inproceedings)

Pdf Project Page [BibTex]

2010

Romero, J., Feix, T., Kjellström, H., Kragic, D. Spatio-Temporal Modeling of Grasping Actions In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS, pages: 2103-2108, 2010 (inproceedings)

Pdf Project Page [BibTex]

Hands in action: real-time 3D reconstruction of hands in interaction with objects

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

In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages: 458-463, 2010 (inproceedings)

Pdf Project Page [BibTex]

Romero, J., Kjellström, H., Kragic, D. Hands in action: real-time 3D reconstruction of hands in interaction with objects In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages: 458-463, 2010 (inproceedings)

Pdf Project Page [BibTex]

2019

Learning joint reconstruction of hands and manipulated objects

2019

2017

Embodied Hands: Modeling and Capturing Hands and Bodies Together

2017

Capturing Hand-Object Interaction and Reconstruction of Manipulated Objects

2016

The GRASP Taxonomy of Human Grasp Types

2016

Capturing Hands in Action using Discriminative Salient Points and Physics Simulation

2015

3D Object Reconstruction from Hand-Object Interactions

2015

2014

Capturing Hand Motion with an RGB-D Sensor, Fusing a Generative Model with Salient Points

2014

2013

A Comparison of Directional Distances for Hand Pose Estimation

2013

2012

Motion Capture of Hands in Action using Discriminative Salient Points

2012

2010

Spatio-Temporal Modeling of Grasping Actions

2010

Hands in action: real-time 3D reconstruction of hands in interaction with objects

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