Solving 6D pose estimation is non-trivial to cope with intrinsic appearance and shape variation and severe inter-object occlusion, and is made more challenging in light of extrinsic large illumination changes and low quality of the acquired data under an uncontrolled environment. This paper introduces a novel pose estimation algorithm W-PoseNet, which densely regresses from input data to 6D pose and also 3D coordinates in model space. In other words, local features learned for pose regression in our deep network are regularized by explicitly learning pixel-wise correspondence mapping onto 3D pose-sensitive coordinates as an auxiliary task. Moreover, a sparse pair combination of pixel-wise features and soft voting on pixel-pair pose predictions are designed to improve robustness to inconsistent and sparse local features. Experiment results on the popular YCB-Video and LineMOD benchmarks show that the proposed W-PoseNet consistently achieves superior performance to the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Giving different human motions, there may be similar motion features in some body components, e.g., the motion features of arms when performing jogging and running, which are thus less discriminative for motion classification. In this paper, we consider counting less on these body components that have less discriminative information amongst different human motions. To this end, we present a new topic model, probabilistic latent semantic analysis based on multiple bags (M-PLSA), in which not all body components are considered equally important, i.e., motion features of less discriminative components are made less use of so that their contributions for classification are reduced. We use sparse spatio-temporal features extracted from videos to create visual words which are later assigned to different body components that they are detected from, so that co-occurrence matrices of different components can be calculated based on their corresponding vocabularies. Such label task can be automatically fulfilled by using the query visual words, i.e., words whose component labels are unknown, to traverse an automatic label tree (ALT) that grows from the training words with component labels. We show the performance of our approach on KTH dataset.
Estimating 3D human pose from a single image is a challenging task. This work attempts to address the uncertainty of lifting the detected 2D joints to the 3D space by introducing an intermediate state - Part-Centric Heatmap Triplets (HEMlets), which shortens the gap between the 2D observation and the 3D interpretation. The HEMlets utilize three joint-heatmaps to represent the relative depth information of the end-joints for each skeletal body part. In our approach, a Convolutional Network(ConvNet) is first trained to predict HEMlests from the input image, followed by a volumetric joint-heatmap regression. We leverage on the integral operation to extract the joint locations from the volumetric heatmaps, guaranteeing end-to-end learning. Despite the simplicity of the network design, the quantitative comparisons show a significant performance improvement over the best-of-grade method (by 20% on Human3.6M). The proposed method naturally supports training with "in-the-wild'' images, where only weakly-annotated relative depth information of skeletal joints is available. This further improves the generalization ability of our model, as validated by qualitative comparisons on outdoor images.
Domain generalization (DG) for person re-identification (ReID) is a challenging problem, as access to target domain data is not permitted during the training process. Most existing DG ReID methods update the feature extractor and classifier parameters based on the same features. This common practice causes the model to overfit to existing feature styles in the source domain, resulting in sub-optimal generalization ability on target domains. To solve this problem, we propose a novel style interleaved learning (IL) framework. Unlike conventional learning strategies, IL incorporates two forward propagations and one backward propagation for each iteration. We employ the features of interleaved styles to update the feature extractor and classifiers using different forward propagations, which helps to prevent the model from overfitting to certain domain styles. To generate interleaved feature styles, we further propose a new feature stylization approach. It produces a wide range of meaningful styles that are both different and independent from the original styles in the source domain, which caters to the IL methodology. Extensive experimental results show that our model not only consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on large-scale benchmarks for DG ReID, but also has clear advantages in computational efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/WentaoTan/Interleaved-Learning .
Reconstruction of a continuous surface of two-dimensional manifold from its raw, discrete point cloud observation is a long-standing problem in computer vision and graphics research. The problem is technically ill-posed, and becomes more difficult considering that various sensing imperfections would appear in the point clouds obtained by practical depth scanning. In literature, a rich set of methods has been proposed, and reviews of existing methods are also provided. However, existing reviews are short of thorough investigations on a common benchmark. The present paper aims to review and benchmark existing methods in the new era of deep learning surface reconstruction. To this end, we contribute a large-scale benchmarking dataset consisting of both synthetic and real-scanned data; the benchmark includes object- and scene-level surfaces and takes into account various sensing imperfections that are commonly encountered in practical depth scanning. We conduct thorough empirical studies by comparing existing methods on the constructed benchmark, and pay special attention on robustness of existing methods against various scanning imperfections; we also study how different methods generalize in terms of reconstructing complex surface shapes. Our studies help identity the best conditions under which different methods work, and suggest some empirical findings. For example, while deep learning methods are increasingly popular in the research community, our systematic studies suggest that, surprisingly, a few classical methods perform even better in terms of both robustness and generalization; our studies also suggest that the practical challenges of misalignment of point sets from multi-view scanning, missing of surface points, and point outliers remain unsolved by all the existing surface reconstruction methods. We expect that the benchmark and our studies would be valuable both for practitioners and as a guidance for new innovations in future research.
Two-stage Cumulative Attribute (CA) regression has been found effective in regression problems of computer vision such as facial age and crowd density estimation. The first stage regression maps input features to cumulative attributes that encode correlations between target values. The previous works have dealt with single output regression. In this work, we propose cumulative attribute spaces for 2- and 3-output (multivariate) regression. We show how the original CA space can be generalized to multiple output by the Cartesian product (CartCA). However, for target spaces with more than two outputs the CartCA becomes computationally infeasible and therefore we propose an approximate solution - multi-view CA (MvCA) - where CartCA is applied to output pairs. We experimentally verify improved performance of the CartCA and MvCA spaces in 2D and 3D face pose estimation and three-output (RGB) illuminant estimation for color constancy.
Motivated by the problem relatedness between unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) and semi-supervised learning (SSL), many state-of-the-art UDA methods adopt SSL principles (e.g., the cluster assumption) as their learning ingredients. However, they tend to overlook the very domain-shift nature of UDA. In this work, we take a step further to study the proper extensions of SSL techniques for UDA. Taking the algorithm of label propagation (LP) as an example, we analyze the challenges of adopting LP to UDA and theoretically analyze the conditions of affinity graph/matrix construction in order to achieve better propagation of true labels to unlabeled instances. Our analysis suggests a new algorithm of Label Propagation with Augmented Anchors (A$^2$LP), which could potentially improve LP via generation of unlabeled virtual instances (i.e., the augmented anchors) with high-confidence label predictions. To make the proposed A$^2$LP useful for UDA, we propose empirical schemes to generate such virtual instances. The proposed schemes also tackle the domain-shift challenge of UDA by alternating between pseudo labeling via A$^2$LP and domain-invariant feature learning. Experiments show that such a simple SSL extension improves over representative UDA methods of domain-invariant feature learning, and could empower two state-of-the-art methods on benchmark UDA datasets. Our results show the value of further investigation on SSL techniques for UDA problems.
Recovering the intrinsic physical attributes of a scene from images, generally termed as the inverse rendering problem, has been a central and challenging task in computer vision and computer graphics. In this paper, we present GUS-IR, a novel framework designed to address the inverse rendering problem for complicated scenes featuring rough and glossy surfaces. This paper starts by analyzing and comparing two prominent shading techniques popularly used for inverse rendering, forward shading and deferred shading, effectiveness in handling complex materials. More importantly, we propose a unified shading solution that combines the advantages of both techniques for better decomposition. In addition, we analyze the normal modeling in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and utilize the shortest axis as normal for each particle in GUS-IR, along with a depth-related regularization, resulting in improved geometric representation and better shape reconstruction. Furthermore, we enhance the probe-based baking scheme proposed by GS-IR to achieve more accurate ambient occlusion modeling to better handle indirect illumination. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superior performance of GUS-IR in achieving precise intrinsic decomposition and geometric representation, supporting many downstream tasks (such as relighting, retouching) in computer vision, graphics, and extended reality.
Estimating 3D human pose from a single image is a challenging task. This work attempts to address the uncertainty of lifting the detected 2D joints to the 3D space by introducing an intermediate state-Part-Centric Heatmap Triplets (HEMlets), which shortens the gap between the 2D observation and the 3D interpretation. The HEMlets utilize three joint-heatmaps to represent the relative depth information of the end-joints for each skeletal body part. In our approach, a Convolutional Network (ConvNet) is first trained to predict HEMlets from the input image, followed by a volumetric joint-heatmap regression. We leverage on the integral operation to extract the joint locations from the volumetric heatmaps, guaranteeing end-to-end learning. Despite the simplicity of the network design, the quantitative comparisons show a significant performance improvement over the best-of-grade methods (e.g. $20\%$ on Human3.6M). The proposed method naturally supports training with "in-the-wild" images, where only weakly-annotated relative depth information of skeletal joints is available. This further improves the generalization ability of our model, as validated by qualitative comparisons on outdoor images. Leveraging the strength of the HEMlets pose estimation, we further design and append a shallow yet effective network module to regress the SMPL parameters of the body pose and shape. We term the entire HEMlets-based human pose and shape recovery pipeline HEMlets PoSh. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on the existing human body recovery benchmarks justify the state-of-the-art results obtained with our HEMlets PoSh approach.
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