Daily Papers

Estimating 3D human poses only from a 2D human pose sequence is thoroughly explored in recent years. Yet, prior to this, no such work has attempted to unify 2D and 3D pose representations in the shared feature space. In this paper, we propose MPM, a unified 2D-3D human pose representation framework via masked pose modeling. We treat 2D and 3D poses as two different modalities like vision and language and build a single-stream transformer-based architecture. We apply three pretext tasks, which are masked 2D pose modeling, masked 3D pose modeling, and masked 2D pose lifting to pre-train our network and use full-supervision to perform further fine-tuning. A high masking ratio of 72.5% in total with a spatio-temporal mask sampling strategy leading to better relation modeling both in spatial and temporal domains. MPM can handle multiple tasks including 3D human pose estimation, 3D pose estimation from occluded 2D pose, and 3D pose completion in a single framework. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies on several widely used human pose datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. Codes and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/vvirgooo2/MPM

UV map estimation is used in computer vision for detailed analysis of human posture or activity. Previous methods assign pixels to body model vertices by comparing pixel descriptors independently, without enforcing global coherence or plausibility in the UV map. We propose Pose-Constrained Continuous Surface Embeddings (PC-CSE), which integrates estimated 2D human pose into the pixel-to-vertex assignment process. The pose provides global anatomical constraints, ensuring that UV maps remain coherent while preserving local precision. Evaluation on DensePose COCO demonstrates consistent improvement, regardless of the chosen 2D human pose model. Whole-body poses offer better constraints by incorporating additional details about the hands and feet. Conditioning UV maps with human pose reduces invalid mappings and enhances anatomical plausibility. In addition, we highlight inconsistencies in the ground-truth annotations.

Pose estimation has promised to impact healthcare by enabling more practical methods to quantify nuances of human movement and biomechanics. However, despite the inherent connection between pose estimation and biomechanics, these disciplines have largely remained disparate. For example, most current pose estimation benchmarks use metrics such as Mean Per Joint Position Error, Percentage of Correct Keypoints, or mean Average Precision to assess performance, without quantifying kinematic and physiological correctness - key aspects for biomechanics. To alleviate this challenge, we develop OpenCapBench to offer an easy-to-use unified benchmark to assess common tasks in human pose estimation, evaluated under physiological constraints. OpenCapBench computes consistent kinematic metrics through joints angles provided by an open-source musculoskeletal modeling software (OpenSim). Through OpenCapBench, we demonstrate that current pose estimation models use keypoints that are too sparse for accurate biomechanics analysis. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce SynthPose, a new approach that enables finetuning of pre-trained 2D human pose models to predict an arbitrarily denser set of keypoints for accurate kinematic analysis through the use of synthetic data. Incorporating such finetuning on synthetic data of prior models leads to twofold reduced joint angle errors. Moreover, OpenCapBench allows users to benchmark their own developed models on our clinically relevant cohort. Overall, OpenCapBench bridges the computer vision and biomechanics communities, aiming to drive simultaneous advances in both areas.

Pose estimation plays a critical role in human-centered vision applications. However, it is difficult to deploy state-of-the-art HRNet-based pose estimation models on resource-constrained edge devices due to the high computational cost (more than 150 GMACs per frame). In this paper, we study efficient architecture design for real-time multi-person pose estimation on edge. We reveal that HRNet's high-resolution branches are redundant for models at the low-computation region via our gradual shrinking experiments. Removing them improves both efficiency and performance. Inspired by this finding, we design LitePose, an efficient single-branch architecture for pose estimation, and introduce two simple approaches to enhance the capacity of LitePose, including Fusion Deconv Head and Large Kernel Convs. Fusion Deconv Head removes the redundancy in high-resolution branches, allowing scale-aware feature fusion with low overhead. Large Kernel Convs significantly improve the model's capacity and receptive field while maintaining a low computational cost. With only 25% computation increment, 7x7 kernels achieve +14.0 mAP better than 3x3 kernels on the CrowdPose dataset. On mobile platforms, LitePose reduces the latency by up to 5.0x without sacrificing performance, compared with prior state-of-the-art efficient pose estimation models, pushing the frontier of real-time multi-person pose estimation on edge. Our code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/litepose.

The 2D human pose estimation is a basic visual problem. However, supervised learning of a model requires massive labeled images, which is expensive and labor-intensive. In this paper, we aim at boosting the accuracy of a pose estimator by excavating extra unlabeled images in a semi-supervised learning (SSL) way. Most previous consistency-based SSL methods strive to constraint the model to predict consistent results for differently augmented images. Following this consensus, we revisit two core aspects including advanced data augmentation methods and concise consistency training frameworks. Specifically, we heuristically dig various collaborative combinations of existing data augmentations, and discover novel superior data augmentation schemes to more effectively add noise on unlabeled samples. They can compose easy-hard augmentation pairs with larger transformation difficulty gaps, which play a crucial role in consistency-based SSL. Moreover, we propose to strongly augment unlabeled images repeatedly with diverse augmentations, generate multi-path predictions sequentially, and optimize corresponding unsupervised consistency losses using one single network. This simple and compact design is on a par with previous methods consisting of dual or triple networks. Furthermore, it can also be integrated with multiple networks to produce better performance. Comparing to state-of-the-art SSL approaches, our method brings substantial improvements on public datasets. Code is released for academic use in https://github.com/hnuzhy/MultiAugs.

Current Human Pose Estimation methods have achieved significant improvements. However, state-of-the-art models ignore out-of-image keypoints and use uncalibrated heatmaps as keypoint location representations. To address these limitations, we propose ProbPose, which predicts for each keypoint: a calibrated probability of keypoint presence at each location in the activation window, the probability of being outside of it, and its predicted visibility. To address the lack of evaluation protocols for out-of-image keypoints, we introduce the CropCOCO dataset and the Extended OKS (Ex-OKS) metric, which extends OKS to out-of-image points. Tested on COCO, CropCOCO, and OCHuman, ProbPose shows significant gains in out-of-image keypoint localization while also improving in-image localization through data augmentation. Additionally, the model improves robustness along the edges of the bounding box and offers better flexibility in keypoint evaluation. The code and models are available on https://mirapurkrabek.github.io/ProbPose/ for research purposes.

When applying a pre-trained 2D-to-3D human pose lifting model to a target unseen dataset, large performance degradation is commonly encountered due to domain shift issues. We observe that the degradation is caused by two factors: 1) the large distribution gap over global positions of poses between the source and target datasets due to variant camera parameters and settings, and 2) the deficient diversity of local structures of poses in training. To this end, we combine global adaptation and local generalization in PoseDA, a simple yet effective framework of unsupervised domain adaptation for 3D human pose estimation. Specifically, global adaptation aims to align global positions of poses from the source domain to the target domain with a proposed global position alignment (GPA) module. And local generalization is designed to enhance the diversity of 2D-3D pose mapping with a local pose augmentation (LPA) module. These modules bring significant performance improvement without introducing additional learnable parameters. In addition, we propose local pose augmentation (LPA) to enhance the diversity of 3D poses following an adversarial training scheme consisting of 1) a augmentation generator that generates the parameters of pre-defined pose transformations and 2) an anchor discriminator to ensure the reality and quality of the augmented data. Our approach can be applicable to almost all 2D-3D lifting models. PoseDA achieves 61.3 mm of MPJPE on MPI-INF-3DHP under a cross-dataset evaluation setup, improving upon the previous state-of-the-art method by 10.2\%.

Vision-based sign language recognition aims at helping deaf people to communicate with others. However, most existing sign language datasets are limited to a small number of words. Due to the limited vocabulary size, models learned from those datasets cannot be applied in practice. In this paper, we introduce a new large-scale Word-Level American Sign Language (WLASL) video dataset, containing more than 2000 words performed by over 100 signers. This dataset will be made publicly available to the research community. To our knowledge, it is by far the largest public ASL dataset to facilitate word-level sign recognition research. Based on this new large-scale dataset, we are able to experiment with several deep learning methods for word-level sign recognition and evaluate their performances in large scale scenarios. Specifically we implement and compare two different models,i.e., (i) holistic visual appearance-based approach, and (ii) 2D human pose based approach. Both models are valuable baselines that will benefit the community for method benchmarking. Moreover, we also propose a novel pose-based temporal graph convolution networks (Pose-TGCN) that models spatial and temporal dependencies in human pose trajectories simultaneously, which has further boosted the performance of the pose-based method. Our results show that pose-based and appearance-based models achieve comparable performances up to 66% at top-10 accuracy on 2,000 words/glosses, demonstrating the validity and challenges of our dataset. Our dataset and baseline deep models are available at https://dxli94.github.io/WLASL/.

Human pose estimation (HPE) in the top-view using fisheye cameras presents a promising and innovative application domain. However, the availability of datasets capturing this viewpoint is extremely limited, especially those with high-quality 2D and 3D keypoint annotations. Addressing this gap, we leverage the capabilities of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) technique to establish a comprehensive pipeline for generating human pose datasets from existing 2D and 3D datasets, specifically tailored for the top-view fisheye perspective. Through this pipeline, we create a novel dataset NToP570K (NeRF-powered Top-view human Pose dataset for fisheye cameras with over 570 thousand images), and conduct an extensive evaluation of its efficacy in enhancing neural networks for 2D and 3D top-view human pose estimation. A pretrained ViTPose-B model achieves an improvement in AP of 33.3 % on our validation set for 2D HPE after finetuning on our training set. A similarly finetuned HybrIK-Transformer model gains 53.7 mm reduction in PA-MPJPE for 3D HPE on the validation set.

2D-to-3D human pose lifting is fundamental for 3D human pose estimation (HPE), for which graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have proven inherently suitable for modeling the human skeletal topology. However, the current GCN-based 3D HPE methods update the node features by aggregating their neighbors' information without considering the interaction of joints in different joint synergies. Although some studies have proposed importing limb information to learn the movement patterns, the latent synergies among joints, such as maintaining balance are seldom investigated. We propose the Hop-wise GraphFormer with Intragroup Joint Refinement (HopFIR) architecture to tackle the 3D HPE problem. HopFIR mainly consists of a novel hop-wise GraphFormer (HGF) module and an intragroup joint refinement (IJR) module. The HGF module groups the joints by k-hop neighbors and applies a hopwise transformer-like attention mechanism to these groups to discover latent joint synergies. The IJR module leverages the prior limb information for peripheral joint refinement. Extensive experimental results show that HopFIR outperforms the SOTA methods by a large margin, with a mean per-joint position error (MPJPE) on the Human3.6M dataset of 32.67 mm. We also demonstrate that the state-of-the-art GCN-based methods can benefit from the proposed hop-wise attention mechanism with a significant improvement in performance: SemGCN and MGCN are improved by 8.9% and 4.5%, respectively.

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. The project website with videos, results, and code can be found at https://seas.upenn.edu/~nkolot/projects/spin.

The 3D Human Pose Estimation (3D HPE) task uses 2D images or videos to predict human joint coordinates in 3D space. Despite recent advancements in deep learning-based methods, they mostly ignore the capability of coupling accessible texts and naturally feasible knowledge of humans, missing out on valuable implicit supervision to guide the 3D HPE task. Moreover, previous efforts often study this task from the perspective of the whole human body, neglecting fine-grained guidance hidden in different body parts. To this end, we present a new Fine-Grained Prompt-Driven Denoiser based on a diffusion model for 3D HPE, named FinePOSE. It consists of three core blocks enhancing the reverse process of the diffusion model: (1) Fine-grained Part-aware Prompt learning (FPP) block constructs fine-grained part-aware prompts via coupling accessible texts and naturally feasible knowledge of body parts with learnable prompts to model implicit guidance. (2) Fine-grained Prompt-pose Communication (FPC) block establishes fine-grained communications between learned part-aware prompts and poses to improve the denoising quality. (3) Prompt-driven Timestamp Stylization (PTS) block integrates learned prompt embedding and temporal information related to the noise level to enable adaptive adjustment at each denoising step. Extensive experiments on public single-human pose estimation datasets show that FinePOSE outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We further extend FinePOSE to multi-human pose estimation. Achieving 34.3mm average MPJPE on the EgoHumans dataset demonstrates the potential of FinePOSE to deal with complex multi-human scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/FinePOSE_CVPR2024.

Direct prediction of 3D body pose and shape remains a challenge even for highly parameterized deep learning models. Mapping from the 2D image space to the prediction space is difficult: perspective ambiguities make the loss function noisy and training data is scarce. In this paper, we propose a novel approach (Neural Body Fitting (NBF)). It integrates a statistical body model within a CNN, leveraging reliable bottom-up semantic body part segmentation and robust top-down body model constraints. NBF is fully differentiable and can be trained using 2D and 3D annotations. In detailed experiments, we analyze how the components of our model affect performance, especially the use of part segmentations as an explicit intermediate representation, and present a robust, efficiently trainable framework for 3D human pose estimation from 2D images with competitive results on standard benchmarks. Code will be made available at http://github.com/mohomran/neural_body_fitting

Traditionally, monocular 3D human pose estimation employs a machine learning model to predict the most likely 3D pose for a given input image. However, a single image can be highly ambiguous and induces multiple plausible solutions for the 2D-3D lifting step which results in overly confident 3D pose predictors. To this end, we propose DiffPose, a conditional diffusion model, that predicts multiple hypotheses for a given input image. In comparison to similar approaches, our diffusion model is straightforward and avoids intensive hyperparameter tuning, complex network structures, mode collapse, and unstable training. Moreover, we tackle a problem of the common two-step approach that first estimates a distribution of 2D joint locations via joint-wise heatmaps and consecutively approximates them based on first- or second-moment statistics. Since such a simplification of the heatmaps removes valid information about possibly correct, though labeled unlikely, joint locations, we propose to represent the heatmaps as a set of 2D joint candidate samples. To extract information about the original distribution from these samples we introduce our embedding transformer that conditions the diffusion model. Experimentally, we show that DiffPose slightly improves upon the state of the art for multi-hypothesis pose estimation for simple poses and outperforms it by a large margin for highly ambiguous poses.

3D human pose estimation has been a long-standing challenge in computer vision and graphics, where multi-view methods have significantly progressed but are limited by the tedious calibration processes. Existing multi-view methods are restricted to fixed camera pose and therefore lack generalization ability. This paper presents a novel Probabilistic Triangulation module that can be embedded in a calibrated 3D human pose estimation method, generalizing it to uncalibration scenes. The key idea is to use a probability distribution to model the camera pose and iteratively update the distribution from 2D features instead of using camera pose. Specifically, We maintain a camera pose distribution and then iteratively update this distribution by computing the posterior probability of the camera pose through Monte Carlo sampling. This way, the gradients can be directly back-propagated from the 3D pose estimation to the 2D heatmap, enabling end-to-end training. Extensive experiments on Human3.6M and CMU Panoptic demonstrate that our method outperforms other uncalibration methods and achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art calibration methods. Thus, our method achieves a trade-off between estimation accuracy and generalizability. Our code is in https://github.com/bymaths/probabilistic_triangulation

In this work, we aim to improve the 3D reasoning ability of Transformers in multi-view 3D human pose estimation. Recent works have focused on end-to-end learning-based transformer designs, which struggle to resolve geometric information accurately, particularly during occlusion. Instead, we propose a novel hybrid model, MVGFormer, which has a series of geometric and appearance modules organized in an iterative manner. The geometry modules are learning-free and handle all viewpoint-dependent 3D tasks geometrically which notably improves the model's generalization ability. The appearance modules are learnable and are dedicated to estimating 2D poses from image signals end-to-end which enables them to achieve accurate estimates even when occlusion occurs, leading to a model that is both accurate and generalizable to new cameras and geometries. We evaluate our approach for both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, where our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and especially does so by a significant margin in the out-of-domain setting. We will release the code and models: https://github.com/XunshanMan/MVGFormer.

Human pose forecasting garners attention for its diverse applications. However, challenges in modeling the multi-modal nature of human motion and intricate interactions among agents persist, particularly with longer timescales and more agents. In this paper, we propose an interaction-aware trajectory-conditioned long-term multi-agent human pose forecasting model, utilizing a coarse-to-fine prediction approach: multi-modal global trajectories are initially forecasted, followed by respective local pose forecasts conditioned on each mode. In doing so, our Trajectory2Pose model introduces a graph-based agent-wise interaction module for a reciprocal forecast of local motion-conditioned global trajectory and trajectory-conditioned local pose. Our model effectively handles the multi-modality of human motion and the complexity of long-term multi-agent interactions, improving performance in complex environments. Furthermore, we address the lack of long-term (6s+) multi-agent (5+) datasets by constructing a new dataset from real-world images and 2D annotations, enabling a comprehensive evaluation of our proposed model. State-of-the-art prediction performance on both complex and simpler datasets confirms the generalized effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/Jaewoo97/T2P.

Learning-based methods have dominated the 3D human pose estimation (HPE) tasks with significantly better performance in most benchmarks than traditional optimization-based methods. Nonetheless, 3D HPE in the wild is still the biggest challenge of learning-based models, whether with 2D-3D lifting, image-to-3D, or diffusion-based methods, since the trained networks implicitly learn camera intrinsic parameters and domain-based 3D human pose distributions and estimate poses by statistical average. On the other hand, the optimization-based methods estimate results case-by-case, which can predict more diverse and sophisticated human poses in the wild. By combining the advantages of optimization-based and learning-based methods, we propose the Zero-shot Diffusion-based Optimization (ZeDO) pipeline for 3D HPE to solve the problem of cross-domain and in-the-wild 3D HPE. Our multi-hypothesis ZeDO achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on Human3.6M as minMPJPE 51.4mm without training with any 2D-3D or image-3D pairs. Moreover, our single-hypothesis ZeDO achieves SOTA performance on 3DPW dataset with PA-MPJPE 42.6mm on cross-dataset evaluation, which even outperforms learning-based methods trained on 3DPW.

Regression-based methods for 3D human pose estimation directly predict the 3D pose parameters from a 2D image using deep networks. While achieving state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks, their performance degrades under occlusion. In contrast, optimization-based methods fit a parametric body model to 2D features in an iterative manner. The localized reconstruction loss can potentially make them robust to occlusion, but they suffer from the 2D-3D ambiguity. Motivated by the recent success of generative models in rigid object pose estimation, we propose 3D-aware Neural Body Fitting (3DNBF) - an approximate analysis-by-synthesis approach to 3D human pose estimation with SOTA performance and occlusion robustness. In particular, we propose a generative model of deep features based on a volumetric human representation with Gaussian ellipsoidal kernels emitting 3D pose-dependent feature vectors. The neural features are trained with contrastive learning to become 3D-aware and hence to overcome the 2D-3D ambiguity. Experiments show that 3DNBF outperforms other approaches on both occluded and standard benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/edz-o/3DNBF

We propose a 3D generation pipeline that uses diffusion models to generate realistic human digital avatars. Due to the wide variety of human identities, poses, and stochastic details, the generation of 3D human meshes has been a challenging problem. To address this, we decompose the problem into 2D normal map generation and normal map-based 3D reconstruction. Specifically, we first simultaneously generate realistic normal maps for the front and backside of a clothed human, dubbed dual normal maps, using a pose-conditional diffusion model. For 3D reconstruction, we ``carve'' the prior SMPL-X mesh to a detailed 3D mesh according to the normal maps through mesh optimization. To further enhance the high-frequency details, we present a diffusion resampling scheme on both body and facial regions, thus encouraging the generation of realistic digital avatars. We also seamlessly incorporate a recent text-to-image diffusion model to support text-based human identity control. Our method, namely, Chupa, is capable of generating realistic 3D clothed humans with better perceptual quality and identity variety.

Modeling animatable human avatars from RGB videos is a long-standing and challenging problem. Recent works usually adopt MLP-based neural radiance fields (NeRF) to represent 3D humans, but it remains difficult for pure MLPs to regress pose-dependent garment details. To this end, we introduce Animatable Gaussians, a new avatar representation that leverages powerful 2D CNNs and 3D Gaussian splatting to create high-fidelity avatars. To associate 3D Gaussians with the animatable avatar, we learn a parametric template from the input videos, and then parameterize the template on two front \& back canonical Gaussian maps where each pixel represents a 3D Gaussian. The learned template is adaptive to the wearing garments for modeling looser clothes like dresses. Such template-guided 2D parameterization enables us to employ a powerful StyleGAN-based CNN to learn the pose-dependent Gaussian maps for modeling detailed dynamic appearances. Furthermore, we introduce a pose projection strategy for better generalization given novel poses. Overall, our method can create lifelike avatars with dynamic, realistic and generalized appearances. Experiments show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. Code: https://github.com/lizhe00/AnimatableGaussians

Recovering dense human poses from images plays a critical role in establishing an image-to-surface correspondence between RGB images and the 3D surface of the human body, serving the foundation of rich real-world applications, such as virtual humans, monocular-to-3d reconstruction. However, the popular DensePose-COCO dataset relies on a sophisticated manual annotation system, leading to severe limitations in acquiring the denser and more accurate annotated pose resources. In this work, we introduce a new 3D human-body model with a series of decoupled parameters that could freely control the generation of the body. Furthermore, we build a data generation system based on this decoupling 3D model, and construct an ultra dense synthetic benchmark UltraPose, containing around 1.3 billion corresponding points. Compared to the existing manually annotated DensePose-COCO dataset, the synthetic UltraPose has ultra dense image-to-surface correspondences without annotation cost and error. Our proposed UltraPose provides the largest benchmark and data resources for lifting the model capability in predicting more accurate dense poses. To promote future researches in this field, we also propose a transformer-based method to model the dense correspondence between 2D and 3D worlds. The proposed model trained on synthetic UltraPose can be applied to real-world scenarios, indicating the effectiveness of our benchmark and model.

We address the problem of regressing 3D human pose and shape from a single image, with a focus on 3D accuracy. The current best methods leverage large datasets of 3D pseudo-ground-truth (p-GT) and 2D keypoints, leading to robust performance. With such methods, we observe a paradoxical decline in 3D pose accuracy with increasing 2D accuracy. This is caused by biases in the p-GT and the use of an approximate camera projection model. We quantify the error induced by current camera models and show that fitting 2D keypoints and p-GT accurately causes incorrect 3D poses. Our analysis defines the invalid distances within which minimizing 2D and p-GT losses is detrimental. We use this to formulate a new loss Threshold-Adaptive Loss Scaling (TALS) that penalizes gross 2D and p-GT losses but not smaller ones. With such a loss, there are many 3D poses that could equally explain the 2D evidence. To reduce this ambiguity we need a prior over valid human poses but such priors can introduce unwanted bias. To address this, we exploit a tokenized representation of human pose and reformulate the problem as token prediction. This restricts the estimated poses to the space of valid poses, effectively providing a uniform prior. Extensive experiments on the EMDB and 3DPW datasets show that our reformulated keypoint loss and tokenization allows us to train on in-the-wild data while improving 3D accuracy over the state-of-the-art. Our models and code are available for research at https://tokenhmr.is.tue.mpg.de.

Whole-body pose estimation is a challenging task that requires simultaneous prediction of keypoints for the body, hands, face, and feet. Whole-body pose estimation aims to predict fine-grained pose information for the human body, including the face, torso, hands, and feet, which plays an important role in the study of human-centric perception and generation and in various applications. In this work, we present RTMW (Real-Time Multi-person Whole-body pose estimation models), a series of high-performance models for 2D/3D whole-body pose estimation. We incorporate RTMPose model architecture with FPN and HEM (Hierarchical Encoding Module) to better capture pose information from different body parts with various scales. The model is trained with a rich collection of open-source human keypoint datasets with manually aligned annotations and further enhanced via a two-stage distillation strategy. RTMW demonstrates strong performance on multiple whole-body pose estimation benchmarks while maintaining high inference efficiency and deployment friendliness. We release three sizes: m/l/x, with RTMW-l achieving a 70.2 mAP on the COCO-Wholebody benchmark, making it the first open-source model to exceed 70 mAP on this benchmark. Meanwhile, we explored the performance of RTMW in the task of 3D whole-body pose estimation, conducting image-based monocular 3D whole-body pose estimation in a coordinate classification manner. We hope this work can benefit both academic research and industrial applications. The code and models have been made publicly available at: https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmpose/tree/main/projects/rtmpose

We present 3DHumanGAN, a 3D-aware generative adversarial network that synthesizes photorealistic images of full-body humans with consistent appearances under different view-angles and body-poses. To tackle the representational and computational challenges in synthesizing the articulated structure of human bodies, we propose a novel generator architecture in which a 2D convolutional backbone is modulated by a 3D pose mapping network. The 3D pose mapping network is formulated as a renderable implicit function conditioned on a posed 3D human mesh. This design has several merits: i) it leverages the strength of 2D GANs to produce high-quality images; ii) it generates consistent images under varying view-angles and poses; iii) the model can incorporate the 3D human prior and enable pose conditioning. Project page: https://3dhumangan.github.io/.

We present Sapiens, a family of models for four fundamental human-centric vision tasks - 2D pose estimation, body-part segmentation, depth estimation, and surface normal prediction. Our models natively support 1K high-resolution inference and are extremely easy to adapt for individual tasks by simply fine-tuning models pretrained on over 300 million in-the-wild human images. We observe that, given the same computational budget, self-supervised pretraining on a curated dataset of human images significantly boosts the performance for a diverse set of human-centric tasks. The resulting models exhibit remarkable generalization to in-the-wild data, even when labeled data is scarce or entirely synthetic. Our simple model design also brings scalability - model performance across tasks improves as we scale the number of parameters from 0.3 to 2 billion. Sapiens consistently surpasses existing baselines across various human-centric benchmarks. We achieve significant improvements over the prior state-of-the-art on Humans-5K (pose) by 7.6 mAP, Humans-2K (part-seg) by 17.1 mIoU, Hi4D (depth) by 22.4% relative RMSE, and THuman2 (normal) by 53.5% relative angular error.

Advancements in neural implicit representations and differentiable rendering have markedly improved the ability to learn animatable 3D avatars from sparse multi-view RGB videos. However, current methods that map observation space to canonical space often face challenges in capturing pose-dependent details and generalizing to novel poses. While diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities in 2D image generation, their potential for creating animatable 3D avatars from 2D inputs remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce 3D^2-Actor, a novel approach featuring a pose-conditioned 3D-aware human modeling pipeline that integrates iterative 2D denoising and 3D rectifying steps. The 2D denoiser, guided by pose cues, generates detailed multi-view images that provide the rich feature set necessary for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction and pose rendering. Complementing this, our Gaussian-based 3D rectifier renders images with enhanced 3D consistency through a two-stage projection strategy and a novel local coordinate representation. Additionally, we propose an innovative sampling strategy to ensure smooth temporal continuity across frames in video synthesis. Our method effectively addresses the limitations of traditional numerical solutions in handling ill-posed mappings, producing realistic and animatable 3D human avatars. Experimental results demonstrate that 3D^2-Actor excels in high-fidelity avatar modeling and robustly generalizes to novel poses. Code is available at: https://github.com/silence-tang/GaussianActor.

Model pre-training is essential in human-centric perception. In this paper, we first introduce masked image modeling (MIM) as a pre-training approach for this task. Upon revisiting the MIM training strategy, we reveal that human structure priors offer significant potential. Motivated by this insight, we further incorporate an intuitive human structure prior - human parts - into pre-training. Specifically, we employ this prior to guide the mask sampling process. Image patches, corresponding to human part regions, have high priority to be masked out. This encourages the model to concentrate more on body structure information during pre-training, yielding substantial benefits across a range of human-centric perception tasks. To further capture human characteristics, we propose a structure-invariant alignment loss that enforces different masked views, guided by the human part prior, to be closely aligned for the same image. We term the entire method as HAP. HAP simply uses a plain ViT as the encoder yet establishes new state-of-the-art performance on 11 human-centric benchmarks, and on-par result on one dataset. For example, HAP achieves 78.1% mAP on MSMT17 for person re-identification, 86.54% mA on PA-100K for pedestrian attribute recognition, 78.2% AP on MS COCO for 2D pose estimation, and 56.0 PA-MPJPE on 3DPW for 3D pose and shape estimation.

This paper presents DiffSurf, a transformer-based denoising diffusion model for generating and reconstructing 3D surfaces. Specifically, we design a diffusion transformer architecture that predicts noise from noisy 3D surface vertices and normals. With this architecture, DiffSurf is able to generate 3D surfaces in various poses and shapes, such as human bodies, hands, animals and man-made objects. Further, DiffSurf is versatile in that it can address various 3D downstream tasks including morphing, body shape variation and 3D human mesh fitting to 2D keypoints. Experimental results on 3D human model benchmarks demonstrate that DiffSurf can generate shapes with greater diversity and higher quality than previous generative models. Furthermore, when applied to the task of single-image 3D human mesh recovery, DiffSurf achieves accuracy comparable to prior techniques at a near real-time rate.

In this paper we present a high fidelity and articulated 3D human foot model. The model is parameterised by a disentangled latent code in terms of shape, texture and articulated pose. While high fidelity models are typically created with strong supervision such as 3D keypoint correspondences or pre-registration, we focus on the difficult case of little to no annotation. To this end, we make the following contributions: (i) we develop a Foot Implicit Neural Deformation field model, named FIND, capable of tailoring explicit meshes at any resolution i.e. for low or high powered devices; (ii) an approach for training our model in various modes of weak supervision with progressively better disentanglement as more labels, such as pose categories, are provided; (iii) a novel unsupervised part-based loss for fitting our model to 2D images which is better than traditional photometric or silhouette losses; (iv) finally, we release a new dataset of high resolution 3D human foot scans, Foot3D. On this dataset, we show our model outperforms a strong PCA implementation trained on the same data in terms of shape quality and part correspondences, and that our novel unsupervised part-based loss improves inference on images.

In this work, we propose MagicDance, a diffusion-based model for 2D human motion and facial expression transfer on challenging human dance videos. Specifically, we aim to generate human dance videos of any target identity driven by novel pose sequences while keeping the identity unchanged. To this end, we propose a two-stage training strategy to disentangle human motions and appearance (e.g., facial expressions, skin tone and dressing), consisting of the pretraining of an appearance-control block and fine-tuning of an appearance-pose-joint-control block over human dance poses of the same dataset. Our novel design enables robust appearance control with temporally consistent upper body, facial attributes, and even background. The model also generalizes well on unseen human identities and complex motion sequences without the need for any fine-tuning with additional data with diverse human attributes by leveraging the prior knowledge of image diffusion models. Moreover, the proposed model is easy to use and can be considered as a plug-in module/extension to Stable Diffusion. We also demonstrate the model's ability for zero-shot 2D animation generation, enabling not only the appearance transfer from one identity to another but also allowing for cartoon-like stylization given only pose inputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior performance on the TikTok dataset.

Estimating the head pose of a person is a crucial problem that has a large amount of applications such as aiding in gaze estimation, modeling attention, fitting 3D models to video and performing face alignment. Traditionally head pose is computed by estimating some keypoints from the target face and solving the 2D to 3D correspondence problem with a mean human head model. We argue that this is a fragile method because it relies entirely on landmark detection performance, the extraneous head model and an ad-hoc fitting step. We present an elegant and robust way to determine pose by training a multi-loss convolutional neural network on 300W-LP, a large synthetically expanded dataset, to predict intrinsic Euler angles (yaw, pitch and roll) directly from image intensities through joint binned pose classification and regression. We present empirical tests on common in-the-wild pose benchmark datasets which show state-of-the-art results. Additionally we test our method on a dataset usually used for pose estimation using depth and start to close the gap with state-of-the-art depth pose methods. We open-source our training and testing code as well as release our pre-trained models.

We present a method for teaching machines to understand and model the underlying spatial common sense of diverse human-object interactions in 3D in a self-supervised way. This is a challenging task, as there exist specific manifolds of the interactions that can be considered human-like and natural, but the human pose and the geometry of objects can vary even for similar interactions. Such diversity makes the annotating task of 3D interactions difficult and hard to scale, which limits the potential to reason about that in a supervised way. One way of learning the 3D spatial relationship between humans and objects during interaction is by showing multiple 2D images captured from different viewpoints when humans interact with the same type of objects. The core idea of our method is to leverage a generative model that produces high-quality 2D images from an arbitrary text prompt input as an "unbounded" data generator with effective controllability and view diversity. Despite its imperfection of the image quality over real images, we demonstrate that the synthesized images are sufficient to learn the 3D human-object spatial relations. We present multiple strategies to leverage the synthesized images, including (1) the first method to leverage a generative image model for 3D human-object spatial relation learning; (2) a framework to reason about the 3D spatial relations from inconsistent 2D cues in a self-supervised manner via 3D occupancy reasoning with pose canonicalization; (3) semantic clustering to disambiguate different types of interactions with the same object types; and (4) a novel metric to assess the quality of 3D spatial learning of interaction.

We introduce UPose3D, a novel approach for multi-view 3D human pose estimation, addressing challenges in accuracy and scalability. Our method advances existing pose estimation frameworks by improving robustness and flexibility without requiring direct 3D annotations. At the core of our method, a pose compiler module refines predictions from a 2D keypoints estimator that operates on a single image by leveraging temporal and cross-view information. Our novel cross-view fusion strategy is scalable to any number of cameras, while our synthetic data generation strategy ensures generalization across diverse actors, scenes, and viewpoints. Finally, UPose3D leverages the prediction uncertainty of both the 2D keypoint estimator and the pose compiler module. This provides robustness to outliers and noisy data, resulting in state-of-the-art performance in out-of-distribution settings. In addition, for in-distribution settings, UPose3D yields performance rivalling methods that rely on 3D annotated data while being the state-of-the-art among methods relying only on 2D supervision.

This paper introduces a novel human pose estimation benchmark, Human Pose with Millimeter Wave Radar (HuPR), that includes synchronized vision and radio signal components. This dataset is created using cross-calibrated mmWave radar sensors and a monocular RGB camera for cross-modality training of radar-based human pose estimation. There are two advantages of using mmWave radar to perform human pose estimation. First, it is robust to dark and low-light conditions. Second, it is not visually perceivable by humans and thus, can be widely applied to applications with privacy concerns, e.g., surveillance systems in patient rooms. In addition to the benchmark, we propose a cross-modality training framework that leverages the ground-truth 2D keypoints representing human body joints for training, which are systematically generated from the pre-trained 2D pose estimation network based on a monocular camera input image, avoiding laborious manual label annotation efforts. The framework consists of a new radar pre-processing method that better extracts the velocity information from radar data, Cross- and Self-Attention Module (CSAM), to fuse multi-scale radar features, and Pose Refinement Graph Convolutional Networks (PRGCN), to refine the predicted keypoint confidence heatmaps. Our intensive experiments on the HuPR benchmark show that the proposed scheme achieves better human pose estimation performance with only radar data, as compared to traditional pre-processing solutions and previous radio-frequency-based methods.

Human animation from a single reference image shall be flexible to synthesize whole-body motion for either a headshot or whole-body portrait, where the motions are readily controlled by audio signal and text prompts. This is hard for most existing methods as they only support producing pre-specified head or half-body motion aligned with audio inputs. In this paper, we propose a versatile human animation method, i.e., VersaAnimator, which generates whole-body talking human from arbitrary portrait images, not only driven by audio signal but also flexibly controlled by text prompts. Specifically, we design a text-controlled, audio-driven motion generator that produces whole-body motion representations in 3D synchronized with audio inputs while following textual motion descriptions. To promote natural smooth motion, we propose a code-pose translation module to link VAE codebooks with 2D DWposes extracted from template videos. Moreover, we introduce a multi-modal video diffusion that generates photorealistic human animation from a reference image according to both audio inputs and whole-body motion representations. Extensive experiments show that VersaAnimator outperforms existing methods in visual quality, identity preservation, and audio-lip synchronization.

We present En3D, an enhanced generative scheme for sculpting high-quality 3D human avatars. Unlike previous works that rely on scarce 3D datasets or limited 2D collections with imbalanced viewing angles and imprecise pose priors, our approach aims to develop a zero-shot 3D generative scheme capable of producing visually realistic, geometrically accurate and content-wise diverse 3D humans without relying on pre-existing 3D or 2D assets. To address this challenge, we introduce a meticulously crafted workflow that implements accurate physical modeling to learn the enhanced 3D generative model from synthetic 2D data. During inference, we integrate optimization modules to bridge the gap between realistic appearances and coarse 3D shapes. Specifically, En3D comprises three modules: a 3D generator that accurately models generalizable 3D humans with realistic appearance from synthesized balanced, diverse, and structured human images; a geometry sculptor that enhances shape quality using multi-view normal constraints for intricate human anatomy; and a texturing module that disentangles explicit texture maps with fidelity and editability, leveraging semantical UV partitioning and a differentiable rasterizer. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms prior works in terms of image quality, geometry accuracy and content diversity. We also showcase the applicability of our generated avatars for animation and editing, as well as the scalability of our approach for content-style free adaptation.

Conventional 2D human pose estimation methods typically require extensive labeled annotations, which are both labor-intensive and expensive. In contrast, semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation can alleviate the above problems by leveraging a large amount of unlabeled data along with a small portion of labeled data. Existing semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation methods update the network through backpropagation, ignoring crucial historical information from the previous training process. Therefore, we propose a novel semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation method by utilizing a newly designed Teacher-Reviewer-Student framework. Specifically, we first mimic the phenomenon that human beings constantly review previous knowledge for consolidation to design our framework, in which the teacher predicts results to guide the student's learning and the reviewer stores important historical parameters to provide additional supervision signals. Secondly, we introduce a Multi-level Feature Learning strategy, which utilizes the outputs from different stages of the backbone to estimate the heatmap to guide network training, enriching the supervisory information while effectively capturing keypoint relationships. Finally, we design a data augmentation strategy, i.e., Keypoint-Mix, to perturb pose information by mixing different keypoints, thus enhancing the network's ability to discern keypoints. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets, demonstrate our method achieves significant improvements compared to the existing methods.

We propose a direct, regression-based approach to 2D human pose estimation from single images. We formulate the problem as a sequence prediction task, which we solve using a Transformer network. This network directly learns a regression mapping from images to the keypoint coordinates, without resorting to intermediate representations such as heatmaps. This approach avoids much of the complexity associated with heatmap-based approaches. To overcome the feature misalignment issues of previous regression-based methods, we propose an attention mechanism that adaptively attends to the features that are most relevant to the target keypoints, considerably improving the accuracy. Importantly, our framework is end-to-end differentiable, and naturally learns to exploit the dependencies between keypoints. Experiments on MS-COCO and MPII, two predominant pose-estimation datasets, demonstrate that our method significantly improves upon the state-of-the-art in regression-based pose estimation. More notably, ours is the first regression-based approach to perform favorably compared to the best heatmap-based pose estimation methods.

In this paper, we introduce a method for reconstructing 3D humans from a single image using a biomechanically accurate skeleton model. To achieve this, we train a transformer that takes an image as input and estimates the parameters of the model. Due to the lack of training data for this task, we build a pipeline to produce pseudo ground truth model parameters for single images and implement a training procedure that iteratively refines these pseudo labels. Compared to state-of-the-art methods for 3D human mesh recovery, our model achieves competitive performance on standard benchmarks, while it significantly outperforms them in settings with extreme 3D poses and viewpoints. Additionally, we show that previous reconstruction methods frequently violate joint angle limits, leading to unnatural rotations. In contrast, our approach leverages the biomechanically plausible degrees of freedom making more realistic joint rotation estimates. We validate our approach across multiple human pose estimation benchmarks. We make the code, models and data available at: https://isshikihugh.github.io/HSMR/

We present a new self-supervised approach, SelfPose3d, for estimating 3d poses of multiple persons from multiple camera views. Unlike current state-of-the-art fully-supervised methods, our approach does not require any 2d or 3d ground-truth poses and uses only the multi-view input images from a calibrated camera setup and 2d pseudo poses generated from an off-the-shelf 2d human pose estimator. We propose two self-supervised learning objectives: self-supervised person localization in 3d space and self-supervised 3d pose estimation. We achieve self-supervised 3d person localization by training the model on synthetically generated 3d points, serving as 3d person root positions, and on the projected root-heatmaps in all the views. We then model the 3d poses of all the localized persons with a bottleneck representation, map them onto all views obtaining 2d joints, and render them using 2d Gaussian heatmaps in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Afterwards, we use the corresponding 2d joints and heatmaps from the pseudo 2d poses for learning. To alleviate the intrinsic inaccuracy of the pseudo labels, we propose an adaptive supervision attention mechanism to guide the self-supervision. Our experiments and analysis on three public benchmark datasets, including Panoptic, Shelf, and Campus, show the effectiveness of our approach, which is comparable to fully-supervised methods. Code: https://github.com/CAMMA-public/SelfPose3D. Video demo: https://youtu.be/GAqhmUIr2E8.

The goal of this paper is to advance the state-of-the-art of articulated pose estimation in scenes with multiple people. To that end we contribute on three fronts. We propose (1) improved body part detectors that generate effective bottom-up proposals for body parts; (2) novel image-conditioned pairwise terms that allow to assemble the proposals into a variable number of consistent body part configurations; and (3) an incremental optimization strategy that explores the search space more efficiently thus leading both to better performance and significant speed-up factors. Evaluation is done on two single-person and two multi-person pose estimation benchmarks. The proposed approach significantly outperforms best known multi-person pose estimation results while demonstrating competitive performance on the task of single person pose estimation. Models and code available at http://pose.mpi-inf.mpg.de

Existing volumetric methods for predicting 3D human pose estimation are accurate, but computationally expensive and optimized for single time-step prediction. We present TEMPO, an efficient multi-view pose estimation model that learns a robust spatiotemporal representation, improving pose accuracy while also tracking and forecasting human pose. We significantly reduce computation compared to the state-of-the-art by recurrently computing per-person 2D pose features, fusing both spatial and temporal information into a single representation. In doing so, our model is able to use spatiotemporal context to predict more accurate human poses without sacrificing efficiency. We further use this representation to track human poses over time as well as predict future poses. Finally, we demonstrate that our model is able to generalize across datasets without scene-specific fine-tuning. TEMPO achieves 10% better MPJPE with a 33times improvement in FPS compared to TesseTrack on the challenging CMU Panoptic Studio dataset.

3D human pose estimation has been researched for decades with promising fruits. 3D human pose lifting is one of the promising research directions toward the task where both estimated pose and ground truth pose data are used for training. Existing pose lifting works mainly focus on improving the performance of estimated pose, but they usually underperform when testing on the ground truth pose data. We observe that the performance of the estimated pose can be easily improved by preparing good quality 2D pose, such as fine-tuning the 2D pose or using advanced 2D pose detectors. As such, we concentrate on improving the 3D human pose lifting via ground truth data for the future improvement of more quality estimated pose data. Towards this goal, a simple yet effective model called Global-local Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network (GLA-GCN) is proposed in this work. Our GLA-GCN globally models the spatiotemporal structure via a graph representation and backtraces local joint features for 3D human pose estimation via individually connected layers. To validate our model design, we conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets: Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, and MPI-INF-3DHP. Experimental results show that our GLA-GCN implemented with ground truth 2D poses significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods (e.g., up to around 3%, 17%, and 14% error reductions on Human3.6M, HumanEva-I, and MPI-INF-3DHP, respectively). GitHub: https://github.com/bruceyo/GLA-GCN.

Estimating human pose and shape from monocular images is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Since the release of statistical body models, 3D human mesh recovery has been drawing broader attention. With the same goal of obtaining well-aligned and physically plausible mesh results, two paradigms have been developed to overcome challenges in the 2D-to-3D lifting process: i) an optimization-based paradigm, where different data terms and regularization terms are exploited as optimization objectives; and ii) a regression-based paradigm, where deep learning techniques are embraced to solve the problem in an end-to-end fashion. Meanwhile, continuous efforts are devoted to improving the quality of 3D mesh labels for a wide range of datasets. Though remarkable progress has been achieved in the past decade, the task is still challenging due to flexible body motions, diverse appearances, complex environments, and insufficient in-the-wild annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey to focus on the task of monocular 3D human mesh recovery. We start with the introduction of body models and then elaborate recovery frameworks and training objectives by providing in-depth analyses of their strengths and weaknesses. We also summarize datasets, evaluation metrics, and benchmark results. Open issues and future directions are discussed in the end, hoping to motivate researchers and facilitate their research in this area. A regularly updated project page can be found at https://github.com/tinatiansjz/hmr-survey.

We present a real-time approach for multi-person 3D motion capture at over 30 fps using a single RGB camera. It operates successfully in generic scenes which may contain occlusions by objects and by other people. Our method operates in subsequent stages. The first stage is a convolutional neural network (CNN) that estimates 2D and 3D pose features along with identity assignments for all visible joints of all individuals.We contribute a new architecture for this CNN, called SelecSLS Net, that uses novel selective long and short range skip connections to improve the information flow allowing for a drastically faster network without compromising accuracy. In the second stage, a fully connected neural network turns the possibly partial (on account of occlusion) 2Dpose and 3Dpose features for each subject into a complete 3Dpose estimate per individual. The third stage applies space-time skeletal model fitting to the predicted 2D and 3D pose per subject to further reconcile the 2D and 3D pose, and enforce temporal coherence. Our method returns the full skeletal pose in joint angles for each subject. This is a further key distinction from previous work that do not produce joint angle results of a coherent skeleton in real time for multi-person scenes. The proposed system runs on consumer hardware at a previously unseen speed of more than 30 fps given 512x320 images as input while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy, which we will demonstrate on a range of challenging real-world scenes.

Human pose and shape (HPS) estimation methods achieve remarkable results. However, current HPS benchmarks are mostly designed to test models in scenarios that are similar to the training data. This can lead to critical situations in real-world applications when the observed data differs significantly from the training data and hence is out-of-distribution (OOD). It is therefore important to test and improve the OOD robustness of HPS methods. To address this fundamental problem, we develop a simulator that can be controlled in a fine-grained manner using interpretable parameters to explore the manifold of images of human pose, e.g. by varying poses, shapes, and clothes. We introduce a learning-based testing method, termed PoseExaminer, that automatically diagnoses HPS algorithms by searching over the parameter space of human pose images to find the failure modes. Our strategy for exploring this high-dimensional parameter space is a multi-agent reinforcement learning system, in which the agents collaborate to explore different parts of the parameter space. We show that our PoseExaminer discovers a variety of limitations in current state-of-the-art models that are relevant in real-world scenarios but are missed by current benchmarks. For example, it finds large regions of realistic human poses that are not predicted correctly, as well as reduced performance for humans with skinny and corpulent body shapes. In addition, we show that fine-tuning HPS methods by exploiting the failure modes found by PoseExaminer improve their robustness and even their performance on standard benchmarks by a significant margin. The code are available for research purposes.

Reconstructing realistic 3D human models from monocular images has significant applications in creative industries, human-computer interfaces, and healthcare. We base our work on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), a scene representation composed of a mixture of Gaussians. Predicting such mixtures for a human from a single input image is challenging, as it is a non-uniform density (with a many-to-one relationship with input pixels) with strict physical constraints. At the same time, it needs to be flexible to accommodate a variety of clothes and poses. Our key observation is that the vertices of standardized human meshes (such as SMPL) can provide an adequate density and approximate initial position for Gaussians. We can then train a transformer model to jointly predict comparatively small adjustments to these positions, as well as the other Gaussians' attributes and the SMPL parameters. We show empirically that this combination (using only multi-view supervision) can achieve fast inference of 3D human models from a single image without test-time optimization, expensive diffusion models, or 3D points supervision. We also show that it can improve 3D pose estimation by better fitting human models that account for clothes and other variations. The code is available on the project website https://abdullahamdi.com/gst/ .

2D/3D human pose estimation is needed to develop novel intelligent tools for the operating room that can analyze and support the clinical activities. The lack of annotated data and the complexity of state-of-the-art pose estimation approaches limit, however, the deployment of such techniques inside the OR. In this work, we propose to use knowledge distillation in a teacher/student framework to harness the knowledge present in a large-scale non-annotated dataset and in an accurate but complex multi-stage teacher network to train a lightweight network for joint 2D/3D pose estimation. The teacher network also exploits the unlabeled data to generate both hard and soft labels useful in improving the student predictions. The easily deployable network trained using this effective self-supervision strategy performs on par with the teacher network on MVOR+, an extension of the public MVOR dataset where all persons have been fully annotated, thus providing a viable solution for real-time 2D/3D human pose estimation in the OR.

We present Multi-HMR, a strong sigle-shot model for multi-person 3D human mesh recovery from a single RGB image. Predictions encompass the whole body, i.e., including hands and facial expressions, using the SMPL-X parametric model and 3D location in the camera coordinate system. Our model detects people by predicting coarse 2D heatmaps of person locations, using features produced by a standard Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone. It then predicts their whole-body pose, shape and 3D location using a new cross-attention module called the Human Prediction Head (HPH), with one query attending to the entire set of features for each detected person. As direct prediction of fine-grained hands and facial poses in a single shot, i.e., without relying on explicit crops around body parts, is hard to learn from existing data, we introduce CUFFS, the Close-Up Frames of Full-Body Subjects dataset, containing humans close to the camera with diverse hand poses. We show that incorporating it into the training data further enhances predictions, particularly for hands. Multi-HMR also optionally accounts for camera intrinsics, if available, by encoding camera ray directions for each image token. This simple design achieves strong performance on whole-body and body-only benchmarks simultaneously: a ViT-S backbone on 448{times}448 images already yields a fast and competitive model, while larger models and higher resolutions obtain state-of-the-art results.

With the recent advancements in single-image-based human mesh recovery, there is a growing interest in enhancing its performance in certain extreme scenarios, such as occlusion, while maintaining overall model accuracy. Although obtaining accurately annotated 3D human poses under occlusion is challenging, there is still a wealth of rich and precise 2D pose annotations that can be leveraged. However, existing works mostly focus on directly leveraging 2D pose coordinates to estimate 3D pose and mesh. In this paper, we present PostoMETRO(Pose token enhanced MEsh TRansfOrmer), which integrates occlusion-resilient 2D pose representation into transformers in a token-wise manner. Utilizing a specialized pose tokenizer, we efficiently condense 2D pose data to a compact sequence of pose tokens and feed them to the transformer together with the image tokens. This process not only ensures a rich depiction of texture from the image but also fosters a robust integration of pose and image information. Subsequently, these combined tokens are queried by vertex and joint tokens to decode 3D coordinates of mesh vertices and human joints. Facilitated by the robust pose token representation and the effective combination, we are able to produce more precise 3D coordinates, even under extreme scenarios like occlusion. Experiments on both standard and occlusion-specific benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of PostoMETRO. Qualitative results further illustrate the clarity of how 2D pose can help 3D reconstruction. Code will be made available.

By leveraging temporal dependency in video sequences, multi-frame human pose estimation algorithms have demonstrated remarkable results in complicated situations, such as occlusion, motion blur, and video defocus. These algorithms are predominantly based on heatmaps, resulting in high computation and storage requirements per frame, which limits their flexibility and real-time application in video scenarios, particularly on edge devices. In this paper, we develop an efficient and effective video-based human pose regression method, which bypasses intermediate representations such as heatmaps and instead directly maps the input to the output joint coordinates. Despite the inherent spatial correlation among adjacent joints of the human pose, the temporal trajectory of each individual joint exhibits relative independence. In light of this, we propose a novel Decoupled Space-Time Aggregation network (DSTA) to separately capture the spatial contexts between adjacent joints and the temporal cues of each individual joint, thereby avoiding the conflation of spatiotemporal dimensions. Concretely, DSTA learns a dedicated feature token for each joint to facilitate the modeling of their spatiotemporal dependencies. With the proposed joint-wise local-awareness attention mechanism, our method is capable of efficiently and flexibly utilizing the spatial dependency of adjacent joints and the temporal dependency of each joint itself. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method. Compared to previous regression-based single-frame human pose estimation methods, DSTA significantly enhances performance, achieving an 8.9 mAP improvement on PoseTrack2017. Furthermore, our approach either surpasses or is on par with the state-of-the-art heatmap-based multi-frame human pose estimation methods. Project page: https://github.com/zgspose/DSTA.

The appearance of a human in clothing is driven not only by the pose but also by its temporal context, i.e., motion. However, such context has been largely neglected by existing monocular human modeling methods whose neural networks often struggle to learn a video of a person with large dynamics due to the motion ambiguity, i.e., there exist numerous geometric configurations of clothes that are dependent on the context of motion even for the same pose. In this paper, we introduce a method for high-quality modeling of clothed 3D human avatars using a video of a person with dynamic movements. The main challenge comes from the lack of 3D ground truth data of geometry and its temporal correspondences. We address this challenge by introducing a novel compositional human modeling framework that takes advantage of both explicit and implicit human modeling. For explicit modeling, a neural network learns to generate point-wise shape residuals and appearance features of a 3D body model by comparing its 2D rendering results and the original images. This explicit model allows for the reconstruction of discriminative 3D motion features from UV space by encoding their temporal correspondences. For implicit modeling, an implicit network combines the appearance and 3D motion features to decode high-fidelity clothed 3D human avatars with motion-dependent geometry and texture. The experiments show that our method can generate a large variation of secondary motion in a physically plausible way.

Creating a high-fidelity, animatable 3D full-body avatar from a single image is a challenging task due to the diverse appearance and poses of humans and the limited availability of high-quality training data. To achieve fast and high-quality human reconstruction, this work rethinks the task from the perspectives of dataset, model, and representation. First, we introduce a large-scale HUman-centric GEnerated dataset, HuGe100K, consisting of 100K diverse, photorealistic sets of human images. Each set contains 24-view frames in specific human poses, generated using a pose-controllable image-to-multi-view model. Next, leveraging the diversity in views, poses, and appearances within HuGe100K, we develop a scalable feed-forward transformer model to predict a 3D human Gaussian representation in a uniform space from a given human image. This model is trained to disentangle human pose, body shape, clothing geometry, and texture. The estimated Gaussians can be animated without post-processing. We conduct comprehensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed dataset and method. Our model demonstrates the ability to efficiently reconstruct photorealistic humans at 1K resolution from a single input image using a single GPU instantly. Additionally, it seamlessly supports various applications, as well as shape and texture editing tasks.

Realtime multi-person 2D pose estimation is a key component in enabling machines to have an understanding of people in images and videos. In this work, we present a realtime approach to detect the 2D pose of multiple people in an image. The proposed method uses a nonparametric representation, which we refer to as Part Affinity Fields (PAFs), to learn to associate body parts with individuals in the image. This bottom-up system achieves high accuracy and realtime performance, regardless of the number of people in the image. In previous work, PAFs and body part location estimation were refined simultaneously across training stages. We demonstrate that a PAF-only refinement rather than both PAF and body part location refinement results in a substantial increase in both runtime performance and accuracy. We also present the first combined body and foot keypoint detector, based on an internal annotated foot dataset that we have publicly released. We show that the combined detector not only reduces the inference time compared to running them sequentially, but also maintains the accuracy of each component individually. This work has culminated in the release of OpenPose, the first open-source realtime system for multi-person 2D pose detection, including body, foot, hand, and facial keypoints.

We propose a method for human pose estimation based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). The pose estimation is formulated as a DNN-based regression problem towards body joints. We present a cascade of such DNN regressors which results in high precision pose estimates. The approach has the advantage of reasoning about pose in a holistic fashion and has a simple but yet powerful formulation which capitalizes on recent advances in Deep Learning. We present a detailed empirical analysis with state-of-art or better performance on four academic benchmarks of diverse real-world images.

3D human generation is increasingly significant in various applications. However, the direct use of 2D generative methods in 3D generation often results in significant loss of local details, while methods that reconstruct geometry from generated images struggle with global view consistency. In this work, we introduce Joint2Human, a novel method that leverages 2D diffusion models to generate detailed 3D human geometry directly, ensuring both global structure and local details. To achieve this, we employ the Fourier occupancy field (FOF) representation, enabling the direct production of 3D shapes as preliminary results using 2D generative models. With the proposed high-frequency enhancer and the multi-view recarving strategy, our method can seamlessly integrate the details from different views into a uniform global shape.To better utilize the 3D human prior and enhance control over the generated geometry, we introduce a compact spherical embedding of 3D joints. This allows for effective application of pose guidance during the generation process. Additionally, our method is capable of generating 3D humans guided by textual inputs. Our experimental results demonstrate the capability of our method to ensure global structure, local details, high resolution, and low computational cost, simultaneously. More results and code can be found on our project page at http://cic.tju.edu.cn/faculty/likun/projects/Joint2Human.

Learning to regress 3D human body shape and pose (e.g.~SMPL parameters) from monocular images typically exploits losses on 2D keypoints, silhouettes, and/or part-segmentation when 3D training data is not available. Such losses, however, are limited because 2D keypoints do not supervise body shape and segmentations of people in clothing do not match projected minimally-clothed SMPL shapes. To exploit richer image information about clothed people, we introduce higher-level semantic information about clothing to penalize clothed and non-clothed regions of the image differently. To do so, we train a body regressor using a novel Differentiable Semantic Rendering - DSR loss. For Minimally-Clothed regions, we define the DSR-MC loss, which encourages a tight match between a rendered SMPL body and the minimally-clothed regions of the image. For clothed regions, we define the DSR-C loss to encourage the rendered SMPL body to be inside the clothing mask. To ensure end-to-end differentiable training, we learn a semantic clothing prior for SMPL vertices from thousands of clothed human scans. We perform extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments to evaluate the role of clothing semantics on the accuracy of 3D human pose and shape estimation. We outperform all previous state-of-the-art methods on 3DPW and Human3.6M and obtain on par results on MPI-INF-3DHP. Code and trained models are available for research at https://dsr.is.tue.mpg.de/.

Training accurate 3D human pose estimators requires large amount of 3D ground-truth data which is costly to collect. Various weakly or self supervised pose estimation methods have been proposed due to lack of 3D data. Nevertheless, these methods, in addition to 2D ground-truth poses, require either additional supervision in various forms (e.g. unpaired 3D ground truth data, a small subset of labels) or the camera parameters in multiview settings. To address these problems, we present EpipolarPose, a self-supervised learning method for 3D human pose estimation, which does not need any 3D ground-truth data or camera extrinsics. During training, EpipolarPose estimates 2D poses from multi-view images, and then, utilizes epipolar geometry to obtain a 3D pose and camera geometry which are subsequently used to train a 3D pose estimator. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on standard benchmark datasets i.e. Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP where we set the new state-of-the-art among weakly/self-supervised methods. Furthermore, we propose a new performance measure Pose Structure Score (PSS) which is a scale invariant, structure aware measure to evaluate the structural plausibility of a pose with respect to its ground truth. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/mkocabas/EpipolarPose

Human pose estimation methods work well on isolated people but struggle with multiple-bodies-in-proximity scenarios. Previous work has addressed this problem by conditioning pose estimation by detected bounding boxes or keypoints, but overlooked instance masks. We propose to iteratively enforce mutual consistency of bounding boxes, instance masks, and poses. The introduced BBox-Mask-Pose (BMP) method uses three specialized models that improve each other's output in a closed loop. All models are adapted for mutual conditioning, which improves robustness in multi-body scenes. MaskPose, a new mask-conditioned pose estimation model, is the best among top-down approaches on OCHuman. BBox-Mask-Pose pushes SOTA on OCHuman dataset in all three tasks - detection, instance segmentation, and pose estimation. It also achieves SOTA performance on COCO pose estimation. The method is especially good in scenes with large instances overlap, where it improves detection by 39% over the baseline detector. With small specialized models and faster runtime, BMP is an effective alternative to large human-centered foundational models. Code and models are available on https://MiraPurkrabek.github.io/BBox-Mask-Pose.

Human pose information is a critical component in many downstream image processing tasks, such as activity recognition and motion tracking. Likewise, a pose estimator for the illustrated character domain would provide a valuable prior for assistive content creation tasks, such as reference pose retrieval and automatic character animation. But while modern data-driven techniques have substantially improved pose estimation performance on natural images, little work has been done for illustrations. In our work, we bridge this domain gap by efficiently transfer-learning from both domain-specific and task-specific source models. Additionally, we upgrade and expand an existing illustrated pose estimation dataset, and introduce two new datasets for classification and segmentation subtasks. We then apply the resultant state-of-the-art character pose estimator to solve the novel task of pose-guided illustration retrieval. All data, models, and code will be made publicly available.

Estimating human and camera trajectories with accurate scale in the world coordinate system from a monocular video is a highly desirable yet challenging and ill-posed problem. In this study, we aim to recover expressive parametric human models (i.e., SMPL-X) and corresponding camera poses jointly, by leveraging the synergy between three critical players: the world, the human, and the camera. Our approach is founded on two key observations. Firstly, camera-frame SMPL-X estimation methods readily recover absolute human depth. Secondly, human motions inherently provide absolute spatial cues. By integrating these insights, we introduce a novel framework, referred to as WHAC, to facilitate world-grounded expressive human pose and shape estimation (EHPS) alongside camera pose estimation, without relying on traditional optimization techniques. Additionally, we present a new synthetic dataset, WHAC-A-Mole, which includes accurately annotated humans and cameras, and features diverse interactive human motions as well as realistic camera trajectories. Extensive experiments on both standard and newly established benchmarks highlight the superiority and efficacy of our framework. We will make the code and dataset publicly available.

We consider the task of learning to estimate human pose in still images. In order to avoid the high cost of full supervision, we propose to use a diverse data set, which consists of two types of annotations: (i) a small number of images are labeled using the expensive ground-truth pose; and (ii) other images are labeled using the inexpensive action label. As action information helps narrow down the pose of a human, we argue that this approach can help reduce the cost of training without significantly affecting the accuracy. To demonstrate this we design a probabilistic framework that employs two distributions: (i) a conditional distribution to model the uncertainty over the human pose given the image and the action; and (ii) a prediction distribution, which provides the pose of an image without using any action information. We jointly estimate the parameters of the two aforementioned distributions by minimizing their dissimilarity coefficient, as measured by a task-specific loss function. During both training and testing, we only require an efficient sampling strategy for both the aforementioned distributions. This allows us to use deep probabilistic networks that are capable of providing accurate pose estimates for previously unseen images. Using the MPII data set, we show that our approach outperforms baseline methods that either do not use the diverse annotations or rely on pointwise estimates of the pose.

We present MultiPly, a novel framework to reconstruct multiple people in 3D from monocular in-the-wild videos. Reconstructing multiple individuals moving and interacting naturally from monocular in-the-wild videos poses a challenging task. Addressing it necessitates precise pixel-level disentanglement of individuals without any prior knowledge about the subjects. Moreover, it requires recovering intricate and complete 3D human shapes from short video sequences, intensifying the level of difficulty. To tackle these challenges, we first define a layered neural representation for the entire scene, composited by individual human and background models. We learn the layered neural representation from videos via our layer-wise differentiable volume rendering. This learning process is further enhanced by our hybrid instance segmentation approach which combines the self-supervised 3D segmentation and the promptable 2D segmentation module, yielding reliable instance segmentation supervision even under close human interaction. A confidence-guided optimization formulation is introduced to optimize the human poses and shape/appearance alternately. We incorporate effective objectives to refine human poses via photometric information and impose physically plausible constraints on human dynamics, leading to temporally consistent 3D reconstructions with high fidelity. The evaluation of our method shows the superiority over prior art on publicly available datasets and in-the-wild videos.

Domain adaptation methods for 2D human pose estimation typically require continuous access to the source data during adaptation, which can be challenging due to privacy, memory, or computational constraints. To address this limitation, we focus on the task of source-free domain adaptation for pose estimation, where a source model must adapt to a new target domain using only unlabeled target data. Although recent advances have introduced source-free methods for classification tasks, extending them to the regression task of pose estimation is non-trivial. In this paper, we present Prior-guided Self-training (POST), a pseudo-labeling approach that builds on the popular Mean Teacher framework to compensate for the distribution shift. POST leverages prediction-level and feature-level consistency between a student and teacher model against certain image transformations. In the absence of source data, POST utilizes a human pose prior that regularizes the adaptation process by directing the model to generate more accurate and anatomically plausible pose pseudo-labels. Despite being simple and intuitive, our framework can deliver significant performance gains compared to applying the source model directly to the target data, as demonstrated in our extensive experiments and ablation studies. In fact, our approach achieves comparable performance to recent state-of-the-art methods that use source data for adaptation.

In this study, we introduce a methodology for human image animation by leveraging a 3D human parametric model within a latent diffusion framework to enhance shape alignment and motion guidance in curernt human generative techniques. The methodology utilizes the SMPL(Skinned Multi-Person Linear) model as the 3D human parametric model to establish a unified representation of body shape and pose. This facilitates the accurate capture of intricate human geometry and motion characteristics from source videos. Specifically, we incorporate rendered depth images, normal maps, and semantic maps obtained from SMPL sequences, alongside skeleton-based motion guidance, to enrich the conditions to the latent diffusion model with comprehensive 3D shape and detailed pose attributes. A multi-layer motion fusion module, integrating self-attention mechanisms, is employed to fuse the shape and motion latent representations in the spatial domain. By representing the 3D human parametric model as the motion guidance, we can perform parametric shape alignment of the human body between the reference image and the source video motion. Experimental evaluations conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate the methodology's superior ability to generate high-quality human animations that accurately capture both pose and shape variations. Furthermore, our approach also exhibits superior generalization capabilities on the proposed wild dataset. Project page: https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/champ.

We present PersonNeRF, a method that takes a collection of photos of a subject (e.g. Roger Federer) captured across multiple years with arbitrary body poses and appearances, and enables rendering the subject with arbitrary novel combinations of viewpoint, body pose, and appearance. PersonNeRF builds a customized neural volumetric 3D model of the subject that is able to render an entire space spanned by camera viewpoint, body pose, and appearance. A central challenge in this task is dealing with sparse observations; a given body pose is likely only observed by a single viewpoint with a single appearance, and a given appearance is only observed under a handful of different body poses. We address this issue by recovering a canonical T-pose neural volumetric representation of the subject that allows for changing appearance across different observations, but uses a shared pose-dependent motion field across all observations. We demonstrate that this approach, along with regularization of the recovered volumetric geometry to encourage smoothness, is able to recover a model that renders compelling images from novel combinations of viewpoint, pose, and appearance from these challenging unstructured photo collections, outperforming prior work for free-viewpoint human rendering.

In this paper we address the problem of generating person images conditioned on a given pose. Specifically, given an image of a person and a target pose, we synthesize a new image of that person in the novel pose. In order to deal with pixel-to-pixel misalignments caused by the pose differences, we introduce deformable skip connections in the generator of our Generative Adversarial Network. Moreover, a nearest-neighbour loss is proposed instead of the common L1 and L2 losses in order to match the details of the generated image with the target image. We test our approach using photos of persons in different poses and we compare our method with previous work in this area showing state-of-the-art results in two benchmarks. Our method can be applied to the wider field of deformable object generation, provided that the pose of the articulated object can be extracted using a keypoint detector.

In this paper, we present a diffusion model-based framework for animating people from a single image for a given target 3D motion sequence. Our approach has two core components: a) learning priors about invisible parts of the human body and clothing, and b) rendering novel body poses with proper clothing and texture. For the first part, we learn an in-filling diffusion model to hallucinate unseen parts of a person given a single image. We train this model on texture map space, which makes it more sample-efficient since it is invariant to pose and viewpoint. Second, we develop a diffusion-based rendering pipeline, which is controlled by 3D human poses. This produces realistic renderings of novel poses of the person, including clothing, hair, and plausible in-filling of unseen regions. This disentangled approach allows our method to generate a sequence of images that are faithful to the target motion in the 3D pose and, to the input image in terms of visual similarity. In addition to that, the 3D control allows various synthetic camera trajectories to render a person. Our experiments show that our method is resilient in generating prolonged motions and varied challenging and complex poses compared to prior methods. Please check our website for more details: https://boyiliee.github.io/3DHM.github.io/.

We present an approach to efficiently detect the 2D pose of multiple people in an image. The approach uses a nonparametric representation, which we refer to as Part Affinity Fields (PAFs), to learn to associate body parts with individuals in the image. The architecture encodes global context, allowing a greedy bottom-up parsing step that maintains high accuracy while achieving realtime performance, irrespective of the number of people in the image. The architecture is designed to jointly learn part locations and their association via two branches of the same sequential prediction process. Our method placed first in the inaugural COCO 2016 keypoints challenge, and significantly exceeds the previous state-of-the-art result on the MPII Multi-Person benchmark, both in performance and efficiency.

Natural language plays a critical role in many computer vision applications, such as image captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval, to provide fine-grained semantic information. Unfortunately, while human pose is key to human understanding, current 3D human pose datasets lack detailed language descriptions. To address this issue, we have introduced the PoseScript dataset. This dataset pairs more than six thousand 3D human poses from AMASS with rich human-annotated descriptions of the body parts and their spatial relationships. Additionally, to increase the size of the dataset to a scale that is compatible with data-hungry learning algorithms, we have proposed an elaborate captioning process that generates automatic synthetic descriptions in natural language from given 3D keypoints. This process extracts low-level pose information, known as "posecodes", using a set of simple but generic rules on the 3D keypoints. These posecodes are then combined into higher level textual descriptions using syntactic rules. With automatic annotations, the amount of available data significantly scales up (100k), making it possible to effectively pretrain deep models for finetuning on human captions. To showcase the potential of annotated poses, we present three multi-modal learning tasks that utilize the PoseScript dataset. Firstly, we develop a pipeline that maps 3D poses and textual descriptions into a joint embedding space, allowing for cross-modal retrieval of relevant poses from large-scale datasets. Secondly, we establish a baseline for a text-conditioned model generating 3D poses. Thirdly, we present a learned process for generating pose descriptions. These applications demonstrate the versatility and usefulness of annotated poses in various tasks and pave the way for future research in the field.

We present a fast bottom-up method that jointly detects over 100 keypoints on humans or objects, also referred to as human/object pose estimation. We model all keypoints belonging to a human or an object -- the pose -- as a graph and leverage insights from community detection to quantify the independence of keypoints. We use a graph centrality measure to assign training weights to different parts of a pose. Our proposed measure quantifies how tightly a keypoint is connected to its neighborhood. Our experiments show that our method outperforms all previous methods for human pose estimation with fine-grained keypoint annotations on the face, the hands and the feet with a total of 133 keypoints. We also show that our method generalizes to car poses.

Pairwise pose estimation from images with little or no overlap is an open challenge in computer vision. Existing methods, even those trained on large-scale datasets, struggle in these scenarios due to the lack of identifiable correspondences or visual overlap. Inspired by the human ability to infer spatial relationships from diverse scenes, we propose a novel approach, InterPose, that leverages the rich priors encoded within pre-trained generative video models. We propose to use a video model to hallucinate intermediate frames between two input images, effectively creating a dense, visual transition, which significantly simplifies the problem of pose estimation. Since current video models can still produce implausible motion or inconsistent geometry, we introduce a self-consistency score that evaluates the consistency of pose predictions from sampled videos. We demonstrate that our approach generalizes among three state-of-the-art video models and show consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art DUSt3R on four diverse datasets encompassing indoor, outdoor, and object-centric scenes. Our findings suggest a promising avenue for improving pose estimation models by leveraging large generative models trained on vast amounts of video data, which is more readily available than 3D data. See our project page for results: https://inter-pose.github.io/.

We present Vid2Avatar, a method to learn human avatars from monocular in-the-wild videos. Reconstructing humans that move naturally from monocular in-the-wild videos is difficult. Solving it requires accurately separating humans from arbitrary backgrounds. Moreover, it requires reconstructing detailed 3D surface from short video sequences, making it even more challenging. Despite these challenges, our method does not require any groundtruth supervision or priors extracted from large datasets of clothed human scans, nor do we rely on any external segmentation modules. Instead, it solves the tasks of scene decomposition and surface reconstruction directly in 3D by modeling both the human and the background in the scene jointly, parameterized via two separate neural fields. Specifically, we define a temporally consistent human representation in canonical space and formulate a global optimization over the background model, the canonical human shape and texture, and per-frame human pose parameters. A coarse-to-fine sampling strategy for volume rendering and novel objectives are introduced for a clean separation of dynamic human and static background, yielding detailed and robust 3D human geometry reconstructions. We evaluate our methods on publicly available datasets and show improvements over prior art.

In this paper, we study the problem of end-to-end multi-person pose estimation. State-of-the-art solutions adopt the DETR-like framework, and mainly develop the complex decoder, e.g., regarding pose estimation as keypoint box detection and combining with human detection in ED-Pose, hierarchically predicting with pose decoder and joint (keypoint) decoder in PETR. We present a simple yet effective transformer approach, named Group Pose. We simply regard K-keypoint pose estimation as predicting a set of Ntimes K keypoint positions, each from a keypoint query, as well as representing each pose with an instance query for scoring N pose predictions. Motivated by the intuition that the interaction, among across-instance queries of different types, is not directly helpful, we make a simple modification to decoder self-attention. We replace single self-attention over all the Ntimes(K+1) queries with two subsequent group self-attentions: (i) N within-instance self-attention, with each over K keypoint queries and one instance query, and (ii) (K+1) same-type across-instance self-attention, each over N queries of the same type. The resulting decoder removes the interaction among across-instance type-different queries, easing the optimization and thus improving the performance. Experimental results on MS COCO and CrowdPose show that our approach without human box supervision is superior to previous methods with complex decoders, and even is slightly better than ED-Pose that uses human box supervision. https://github.com/Michel-liu/GroupPose-Paddle{rm Paddle} and https://github.com/Michel-liu/GroupPose{rm PyTorch} code are available.

It is now possible to reconstruct dynamic human motion and shape from a sparse set of cameras using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) driven by an underlying skeleton. However, a challenge remains to model the deformation of cloth and skin in relation to skeleton pose. Unlike existing avatar models that are learned implicitly or rely on a proxy surface, our approach is motivated by the observation that different poses necessitate unique frequency assignments. Neglecting this distinction yields noisy artifacts in smooth areas or blurs fine-grained texture and shape details in sharp regions. We develop a two-branch neural network that is adaptive and explicit in the frequency domain. The first branch is a graph neural network that models correlations among body parts locally, taking skeleton pose as input. The second branch combines these correlation features to a set of global frequencies and then modulates the feature encoding. Our experiments demonstrate that our network outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of preserving details and generalization capabilities.

The task of collaborative human pose forecasting stands for predicting the future poses of multiple interacting people, given those in previous frames. Predicting two people in interaction, instead of each separately, promises better performance, due to their body-body motion correlations. But the task has remained so far primarily unexplored. In this paper, we review the progress in human pose forecasting and provide an in-depth assessment of the single-person practices that perform best for 2-body collaborative motion forecasting. Our study confirms the positive impact of frequency input representations, space-time separable and fully-learnable interaction adjacencies for the encoding GCN and FC decoding. Other single-person practices do not transfer to 2-body, so the proposed best ones do not include hierarchical body modeling or attention-based interaction encoding. We further contribute a novel initialization procedure for the 2-body spatial interaction parameters of the encoder, which benefits performance and stability. Altogether, our proposed 2-body pose forecasting best practices yield a performance improvement of 21.9% over the state-of-the-art on the most recent ExPI dataset, whereby the novel initialization accounts for 3.5%. See our project page at https://www.pinlab.org/bestpractices2body

We present animatable neural radiance fields (animatable NeRF) for detailed human avatar creation from monocular videos. Our approach extends neural radiance fields (NeRF) to the dynamic scenes with human movements via introducing explicit pose-guided deformation while learning the scene representation network. In particular, we estimate the human pose for each frame and learn a constant canonical space for the detailed human template, which enables natural shape deformation from the observation space to the canonical space under the explicit control of the pose parameters. To compensate for inaccurate pose estimation, we introduce the pose refinement strategy that updates the initial pose during the learning process, which not only helps to learn more accurate human reconstruction but also accelerates the convergence. In experiments we show that the proposed approach achieves 1) implicit human geometry and appearance reconstruction with high-quality details, 2) photo-realistic rendering of the human from novel views, and 3) animation of the human with novel poses.

Human Pose Estimation (HPE) is widely used in various fields, including motion analysis, healthcare, and virtual reality. However, the great expenses of labeled real-world datasets present a significant challenge for HPE. To overcome this, one approach is to train HPE models on synthetic datasets and then perform domain adaptation (DA) on real-world data. Unfortunately, existing DA methods for HPE neglect data privacy and security by using both source and target data in the adaptation process. To this end, we propose a new task, named source-free domain adaptive HPE, which aims to address the challenges of cross-domain learning of HPE without access to source data during the adaptation process. We further propose a novel framework that consists of three models: source model, intermediate model, and target model, which explores the task from both source-protect and target-relevant perspectives. The source-protect module preserves source information more effectively while resisting noise, and the target-relevant module reduces the sparsity of spatial representations by building a novel spatial probability space, and pose-specific contrastive learning and information maximization are proposed on the basis of this space. Comprehensive experiments on several domain adaptive HPE benchmarks show that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches by a considerable margin. The codes are available at https://github.com/davidpengucf/SFDAHPE.

Conventional 2D pose estimation models are constrained by their design to specific object categories. This limits their applicability to predefined objects. To overcome these limitations, category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) emerged as a solution. CAPE aims to facilitate keypoint localization for diverse object categories using a unified model, which can generalize from minimal annotated support images. Recent CAPE works have produced object poses based on arbitrary keypoint definitions annotated on a user-provided support image. Our work departs from conventional CAPE methods, which require a support image, by adopting a text-based approach instead of the support image. Specifically, we use a pose-graph, where nodes represent keypoints that are described with text. This representation takes advantage of the abstraction of text descriptions and the structure imposed by the graph. Our approach effectively breaks symmetry, preserves structure, and improves occlusion handling. We validate our novel approach using the MP-100 benchmark, a comprehensive dataset spanning over 100 categories and 18,000 images. Under a 1-shot setting, our solution achieves a notable performance boost of 1.07\%, establishing a new state-of-the-art for CAPE. Additionally, we enrich the dataset by providing text description annotations, further enhancing its utility for future research.

We introduce a new silhouette-based representation for modeling clothed human bodies using deep generative models. Our method can reconstruct a complete and textured 3D model of a person wearing clothes from a single input picture. Inspired by the visual hull algorithm, our implicit representation uses 2D silhouettes and 3D joints of a body pose to describe the immense shape complexity and variations of clothed people. Given a segmented 2D silhouette of a person and its inferred 3D joints from the input picture, we first synthesize consistent silhouettes from novel view points around the subject. The synthesized silhouettes which are the most consistent with the input segmentation are fed into a deep visual hull algorithm for robust 3D shape prediction. We then infer the texture of the subject's back view using the frontal image and segmentation mask as input to a conditional generative adversarial network. Our experiments demonstrate that our silhouette-based model is an effective representation and the appearance of the back view can be predicted reliably using an image-to-image translation network. While classic methods based on parametric models often fail for single-view images of subjects with challenging clothing, our approach can still produce successful results, which are comparable to those obtained from multi-view input.

While progress in 2D generative models of human appearance has been rapid, many applications require 3D avatars that can be animated and rendered. Unfortunately, most existing methods for learning generative models of 3D humans with diverse shape and appearance require 3D training data, which is limited and expensive to acquire. The key to progress is hence to learn generative models of 3D avatars from abundant unstructured 2D image collections. However, learning realistic and complete 3D appearance and geometry in this under-constrained setting remains challenging, especially in the presence of loose clothing such as dresses. In this paper, we propose a new adversarial generative model of realistic 3D people from 2D images. Our method captures shape and deformation of the body and loose clothing by adopting a holistic 3D generator and integrating an efficient and flexible articulation module. To improve realism, we train our model using multiple discriminators while also integrating geometric cues in the form of predicted 2D normal maps. We experimentally find that our method outperforms previous 3D- and articulation-aware methods in terms of geometry and appearance. We validate the effectiveness of our model and the importance of each component via systematic ablation studies.

Multi-person pose estimation is fundamental to many computer vision tasks and has made significant progress in recent years. However, few previous methods explored the problem of pose estimation in crowded scenes while it remains challenging and inevitable in many scenarios. Moreover, current benchmarks cannot provide an appropriate evaluation for such cases. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient method to tackle the problem of pose estimation in the crowd and a new dataset to better evaluate algorithms. Our model consists of two key components: joint-candidate single person pose estimation (SPPE) and global maximum joints association. With multi-peak prediction for each joint and global association using graph model, our method is robust to inevitable interference in crowded scenes and very efficient in inference. The proposed method surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on CrowdPose dataset by 5.2 mAP and results on MSCOCO dataset demonstrate the generalization ability of our method. Source code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Whole-body pose estimation localizes the human body, hand, face, and foot keypoints in an image. This task is challenging due to multi-scale body parts, fine-grained localization for low-resolution regions, and data scarcity. Meanwhile, applying a highly efficient and accurate pose estimator to widely human-centric understanding and generation tasks is urgent. In this work, we present a two-stage pose Distillation for Whole-body Pose estimators, named DWPose, to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. The first-stage distillation designs a weight-decay strategy while utilizing a teacher's intermediate feature and final logits with both visible and invisible keypoints to supervise the student from scratch. The second stage distills the student model itself to further improve performance. Different from the previous self-knowledge distillation, this stage finetunes the student's head with only 20% training time as a plug-and-play training strategy. For data limitations, we explore the UBody dataset that contains diverse facial expressions and hand gestures for real-life applications. Comprehensive experiments show the superiority of our proposed simple yet effective methods. We achieve new state-of-the-art performance on COCO-WholeBody, significantly boosting the whole-body AP of RTMPose-l from 64.8% to 66.5%, even surpassing RTMPose-x teacher with 65.3% AP. We release a series of models with different sizes, from tiny to large, for satisfying various downstream tasks. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/DWPose.

Transformers have recently been shown to generate high quality images from text input. However, the existing method of pose conditioning using skeleton image tokens is computationally inefficient and generate low quality images. Therefore we propose a new method; Keypoint Pose Encoding (KPE); KPE is 10 times more memory efficient and over 73% faster at generating high quality images from text input conditioned on the pose. The pose constraint improves the image quality and reduces errors on body extremities such as arms and legs. The additional benefits include invariance to changes in the target image domain and image resolution, making it easily scalable to higher resolution images. We demonstrate the versatility of KPE by generating photorealistic multiperson images derived from the DeepFashion dataset. We also introduce a evaluation method People Count Error (PCE) that is effective in detecting error in generated human images.

Despite significant progress in single image-based 3D human mesh recovery, accurately and smoothly recovering 3D human motion from a video remains challenging. Existing video-based methods generally recover human mesh by estimating the complex pose and shape parameters from coupled image features, whose high complexity and low representation ability often result in inconsistent pose motion and limited shape patterns. To alleviate this issue, we introduce 3D pose as the intermediary and propose a Pose and Mesh Co-Evolution network (PMCE) that decouples this task into two parts: 1) video-based 3D human pose estimation and 2) mesh vertices regression from the estimated 3D pose and temporal image feature. Specifically, we propose a two-stream encoder that estimates mid-frame 3D pose and extracts a temporal image feature from the input image sequence. In addition, we design a co-evolution decoder that performs pose and mesh interactions with the image-guided Adaptive Layer Normalization (AdaLN) to make pose and mesh fit the human body shape. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed PMCE outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of both per-frame accuracy and temporal consistency on three benchmark datasets: 3DPW, Human3.6M, and MPI-INF-3DHP. Our code is available at https://github.com/kasvii/PMCE.

Learning 3D human pose prior is essential to human-centered AI. Here, we present GFPose, a versatile framework to model plausible 3D human poses for various applications. At the core of GFPose is a time-dependent score network, which estimates the gradient on each body joint and progressively denoises the perturbed 3D human pose to match a given task specification. During the denoising process, GFPose implicitly incorporates pose priors in gradients and unifies various discriminative and generative tasks in an elegant framework. Despite the simplicity, GFPose demonstrates great potential in several downstream tasks. Our experiments empirically show that 1) as a multi-hypothesis pose estimator, GFPose outperforms existing SOTAs by 20% on Human3.6M dataset. 2) as a single-hypothesis pose estimator, GFPose achieves comparable results to deterministic SOTAs, even with a vanilla backbone. 3) GFPose is able to produce diverse and realistic samples in pose denoising, completion and generation tasks. Project page https://sites.google.com/view/gfpose/

We introduce DOPE, the first method to detect and estimate whole-body 3D human poses, including bodies, hands and faces, in the wild. Achieving this level of details is key for a number of applications that require understanding the interactions of the people with each other or with the environment. The main challenge is the lack of in-the-wild data with labeled whole-body 3D poses. In previous work, training data has been annotated or generated for simpler tasks focusing on bodies, hands or faces separately. In this work, we propose to take advantage of these datasets to train independent experts for each part, namely a body, a hand and a face expert, and distill their knowledge into a single deep network designed for whole-body 2D-3D pose detection. In practice, given a training image with partial or no annotation, each part expert detects its subset of keypoints in 2D and 3D and the resulting estimations are combined to obtain whole-body pseudo ground-truth poses. A distillation loss encourages the whole-body predictions to mimic the experts' outputs. Our results show that this approach significantly outperforms the same whole-body model trained without distillation while staying close to the performance of the experts. Importantly, DOPE is computationally less demanding than the ensemble of experts and can achieve real-time performance. Test code and models are available at https://europe.naverlabs.com/research/computer-vision/dope.

We present EgoPoseFormer, a simple yet effective transformer-based model for stereo egocentric human pose estimation. The main challenge in egocentric pose estimation is overcoming joint invisibility, which is caused by self-occlusion or a limited field of view (FOV) of head-mounted cameras. Our approach overcomes this challenge by incorporating a two-stage pose estimation paradigm: in the first stage, our model leverages the global information to estimate each joint's coarse location, then in the second stage, it employs a DETR style transformer to refine the coarse locations by exploiting fine-grained stereo visual features. In addition, we present a Deformable Stereo Attention operation to enable our transformer to effectively process multi-view features, which enables it to accurately localize each joint in the 3D world. We evaluate our method on the stereo UnrealEgo dataset and show it significantly outperforms previous approaches while being computationally efficient: it improves MPJPE by 27.4mm (45% improvement) with only 7.9% model parameters and 13.1% FLOPs compared to the state-of-the-art. Surprisingly, with proper training settings, we find that even our first-stage pose proposal network can achieve superior performance compared to previous arts. We also show that our method can be seamlessly extended to monocular settings, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SceneEgo dataset, improving MPJPE by 25.5mm (21% improvement) compared to the best existing method with only 60.7% model parameters and 36.4% FLOPs. Code is available at: https://github.com/ChenhongyiYang/egoposeformer .

The current 3D human pose estimators face challenges in adapting to new datasets due to the scarcity of 2D-3D pose pairs in target domain training sets. We present the Multi-Hypothesis \textbf{Pose Synthesis Domain Adaptation} (PoSynDA) framework to overcome this issue without extensive target domain annotation. Utilizing a diffusion-centric structure, PoSynDA simulates the 3D pose distribution in the target domain, filling the data diversity gap. By incorporating a multi-hypothesis network, it creates diverse pose hypotheses and aligns them with the target domain. Target-specific source augmentation obtains the target domain distribution data from the source domain by decoupling the scale and position parameters. The teacher-student paradigm and low-rank adaptation further refine the process. PoSynDA demonstrates competitive performance on benchmarks, such as Human3.6M, MPI-INF-3DHP, and 3DPW, even comparable with the target-trained MixSTE model~zhang2022mixste. This work paves the way for the practical application of 3D human pose estimation. The code is available at https://github.com/hbing-l/PoSynDA.

Dense human pose estimation is the problem of learning dense correspondences between RGB images and the surfaces of human bodies, which finds various applications, such as human body reconstruction, human pose transfer, and human action recognition. Prior dense pose estimation methods are all based on Mask R-CNN framework and operate in a top-down manner of first attempting to identify a bounding box for each person and matching dense correspondences in each bounding box. Consequently, these methods lack robustness due to their critical dependence on the Mask R-CNN detection, and the runtime increases drastically as the number of persons in the image increases. We therefore propose a novel alternative method for solving the dense pose estimation problem, called Direct Dense Pose (DDP). DDP first predicts the instance mask and global IUV representation separately and then combines them together. We also propose a simple yet effective 2D temporal-smoothing scheme to alleviate the temporal jitters when dealing with video data. Experiments demonstrate that DDP overcomes the limitations of previous top-down baseline methods and achieves competitive accuracy. In addition, DDP is computationally more efficient than previous dense pose estimation methods, and it reduces jitters when applied to a video sequence, which is a problem plaguing the previous methods.

Performance analyses based on videos are commonly used by coaches of athletes in various sports disciplines. In individual sports, these analyses mainly comprise the body posture. This paper focuses on the disciplines of triple, high, and long jump, which require fine-grained locations of the athlete's body. Typical human pose estimation datasets provide only a very limited set of keypoints, which is not sufficient in this case. Therefore, we propose a method to detect arbitrary keypoints on the whole body of the athlete by leveraging the limited set of annotated keypoints and auto-generated segmentation masks of body parts. Evaluations show that our model is capable of detecting keypoints on the head, torso, hands, feet, arms, and legs, including also bent elbows and knees. We analyze and compare different techniques to encode desired keypoints as the model's input and their embedding for the Transformer backbone.

Recent advancements in Gaussian-based human body reconstruction have achieved notable success in creating animatable avatars. However, there are ongoing challenges to fully exploit the SMPL model's prior knowledge and enhance the visual fidelity of these models to achieve more refined avatar reconstructions. In this paper, we introduce AniGaussian which addresses the above issues with two insights. First, we propose an innovative pose guided deformation strategy that effectively constrains the dynamic Gaussian avatar with SMPL pose guidance, ensuring that the reconstructed model not only captures the detailed surface nuances but also maintains anatomical correctness across a wide range of motions. Second, we tackle the expressiveness limitations of Gaussian models in representing dynamic human bodies. We incorporate rigid-based priors from previous works to enhance the dynamic transform capabilities of the Gaussian model. Furthermore, we introduce a split-with-scale strategy that significantly improves geometry quality. The ablative study experiment demonstrates the effectiveness of our innovative model design. Through extensive comparisons with existing methods, AniGaussian demonstrates superior performance in both qualitative result and quantitative metrics.

Video anomaly detection is an ill-posed problem because it relies on many parameters such as appearance, pose, camera angle, background, and more. We distill the problem to anomaly detection of human pose, thus decreasing the risk of nuisance parameters such as appearance affecting the result. Focusing on pose alone also has the side benefit of reducing bias against distinct minority groups. Our model works directly on human pose graph sequences and is exceptionally lightweight (~1K parameters), capable of running on any machine able to run the pose estimation with negligible additional resources. We leverage the highly compact pose representation in a normalizing flows framework, which we extend to tackle the unique characteristics of spatio-temporal pose data and show its advantages in this use case. The algorithm is quite general and can handle training data of only normal examples as well as a supervised setting that consists of labeled normal and abnormal examples. We report state-of-the-art results on two anomaly detection benchmarks - the unsupervised ShanghaiTech dataset and the recent supervised UBnormal dataset.

We propose SplatArmor, a novel approach for recovering detailed and animatable human models by `armoring' a parameterized body model with 3D Gaussians. Our approach represents the human as a set of 3D Gaussians within a canonical space, whose articulation is defined by extending the skinning of the underlying SMPL geometry to arbitrary locations in the canonical space. To account for pose-dependent effects, we introduce a SE(3) field, which allows us to capture both the location and anisotropy of the Gaussians. Furthermore, we propose the use of a neural color field to provide color regularization and 3D supervision for the precise positioning of these Gaussians. We show that Gaussian splatting provides an interesting alternative to neural rendering based methods by leverging a rasterization primitive without facing any of the non-differentiability and optimization challenges typically faced in such approaches. The rasterization paradigms allows us to leverage forward skinning, and does not suffer from the ambiguities associated with inverse skinning and warping. We show compelling results on the ZJU MoCap and People Snapshot datasets, which underscore the effectiveness of our method for controllable human synthesis.

Reconstructing 3D human shape and pose from monocular images is challenging despite the promising results achieved by the most recent learning-based methods. The commonly occurred misalignment comes from the facts that the mapping from images to the model space is highly non-linear and the rotation-based pose representation of body models is prone to result in the drift of joint positions. In this work, we investigate learning 3D human shape and pose from dense correspondences of body parts and propose a Decompose-and-aggregate Network (DaNet) to address these issues. DaNet adopts the dense correspondence maps, which densely build a bridge between 2D pixels and 3D vertices, as intermediate representations to facilitate the learning of 2D-to-3D mapping. The prediction modules of DaNet are decomposed into one global stream and multiple local streams to enable global and fine-grained perceptions for the shape and pose predictions, respectively. Messages from local streams are further aggregated to enhance the robust prediction of the rotation-based poses, where a position-aided rotation feature refinement strategy is proposed to exploit spatial relationships between body joints. Moreover, a Part-based Dropout (PartDrop) strategy is introduced to drop out dense information from intermediate representations during training, encouraging the network to focus on more complementary body parts as well as neighboring position features. The efficacy of the proposed method is validated on both indoor and real-world datasets including Human3.6M, UP3D, COCO, and 3DPW, showing that our method could significantly improve the reconstruction performance in comparison with previous state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://hongwenzhang.github.io/dense2mesh .

In this paper, a real-time method called PoP-Net is proposed to predict multi-person 3D poses from a depth image. PoP-Net learns to predict bottom-up part representations and top-down global poses in a single shot. Specifically, a new part-level representation, called Truncated Part Displacement Field (TPDF), is introduced which enables an explicit fusion process to unify the advantages of bottom-up part detection and global pose detection. Meanwhile, an effective mode selection scheme is introduced to automatically resolve the conflicting cases between global pose and part detections. Finally, due to the lack of high-quality depth datasets for developing multi-person 3D pose estimation, we introduce Multi-Person 3D Human Pose Dataset (MP-3DHP) as a new benchmark. MP-3DHP is designed to enable effective multi-person and background data augmentation in model training, and to evaluate 3D human pose estimators under uncontrolled multi-person scenarios. We show that PoP-Net achieves the state-of-the-art results both on MP-3DHP and on the widely used ITOP dataset, and has significant advantages in efficiency for multi-person processing. To demonstrate one of the applications of our algorithm pipeline, we also show results of virtual avatars driven by our calculated 3D joint positions. MP-3DHP Dataset and the evaluation code have been made available at: https://github.com/oppo-us-research/PoP-Net.

We present a box-free bottom-up approach for the tasks of pose estimation and instance segmentation of people in multi-person images using an efficient single-shot model. The proposed PersonLab model tackles both semantic-level reasoning and object-part associations using part-based modeling. Our model employs a convolutional network which learns to detect individual keypoints and predict their relative displacements, allowing us to group keypoints into person pose instances. Further, we propose a part-induced geometric embedding descriptor which allows us to associate semantic person pixels with their corresponding person instance, delivering instance-level person segmentations. Our system is based on a fully-convolutional architecture and allows for efficient inference, with runtime essentially independent of the number of people present in the scene. Trained on COCO data alone, our system achieves COCO test-dev keypoint average precision of 0.665 using single-scale inference and 0.687 using multi-scale inference, significantly outperforming all previous bottom-up pose estimation systems. We are also the first bottom-up method to report competitive results for the person class in the COCO instance segmentation task, achieving a person category average precision of 0.417.

This is an official pytorch implementation of Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation. In this work, we are interested in the human pose estimation problem with a focus on learning reliable high-resolution representations. Most existing methods recover high-resolution representations from low-resolution representations produced by a high-to-low resolution network. Instead, our proposed network maintains high-resolution representations through the whole process. We start from a high-resolution subnetwork as the first stage, gradually add high-to-low resolution subnetworks one by one to form more stages, and connect the mutli-resolution subnetworks in parallel. We conduct repeated multi-scale fusions such that each of the high-to-low resolution representations receives information from other parallel representations over and over, leading to rich high-resolution representations. As a result, the predicted keypoint heatmap is potentially more accurate and spatially more precise. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our network through the superior pose estimation results over two benchmark datasets: the COCO keypoint detection dataset and the MPII Human Pose dataset. The code and models have been publicly available at https://github.com/leoxiaobin/deep-high-resolution-net.pytorch.

2D keypoints are commonly used as an additional cue to refine estimated 3D human meshes. Current methods optimize the pose and shape parameters with a reprojection loss on the provided 2D keypoints. Such an approach, while simple and intuitive, has limited effectiveness because the optimal solution is hard to find in ambiguous parameter space and may sacrifice depth. Additionally, divergent gradients from distal joints complicate and deviate the refinement of proximal joints in the kinematic chain. To address these, we introduce Kinematic-Tree Rotation (KITRO), a novel mesh refinement strategy that explicitly models depth and human kinematic-tree structure. KITRO treats refinement from a bone-wise perspective. Unlike previous methods which perform gradient-based optimizations, our method calculates bone directions in closed form. By accounting for the 2D pose, bone length, and parent joint's depth, the calculation results in two possible directions for each child joint. We then use a decision tree to trace binary choices for all bones along the human skeleton's kinematic-tree to select the most probable hypothesis. Our experiments across various datasets and baseline models demonstrate that KITRO significantly improves 3D joint estimation accuracy and achieves an ideal 2D fit simultaneously. Our code available at: https://github.com/MartaYang/KITRO.

In this work, we present DreamDance, a novel method for animating human images using only skeleton pose sequences as conditional inputs. Existing approaches struggle with generating coherent, high-quality content in an efficient and user-friendly manner. Concretely, baseline methods relying on only 2D pose guidance lack the cues of 3D information, leading to suboptimal results, while methods using 3D representation as guidance achieve higher quality but involve a cumbersome and time-intensive process. To address these limitations, DreamDance enriches 3D geometry cues from 2D poses by introducing an efficient diffusion model, enabling high-quality human image animation with various guidance. Our key insight is that human images naturally exhibit multiple levels of correlation, progressing from coarse skeleton poses to fine-grained geometry cues, and further from these geometry cues to explicit appearance details. Capturing such correlations could enrich the guidance signals, facilitating intra-frame coherency and inter-frame consistency. Specifically, we construct the TikTok-Dance5K dataset, comprising 5K high-quality dance videos with detailed frame annotations, including human pose, depth, and normal maps. Next, we introduce a Mutually Aligned Geometry Diffusion Model to generate fine-grained depth and normal maps for enriched guidance. Finally, a Cross-domain Controller incorporates multi-level guidance to animate human images effectively with a video diffusion model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in animating human images.

Category-level 3D pose estimation is a fundamentally important problem in computer vision and robotics, e.g. for embodied agents or to train 3D generative models. However, so far methods that estimate the category-level object pose require either large amounts of human annotations, CAD models or input from RGB-D sensors. In contrast, we tackle the problem of learning to estimate the category-level 3D pose only from casually taken object-centric videos without human supervision. We propose a two-step pipeline: First, we introduce a multi-view alignment procedure that determines canonical camera poses across videos with a novel and robust cyclic distance formulation for geometric and appearance matching using reconstructed coarse meshes and DINOv2 features. In a second step, the canonical poses and reconstructed meshes enable us to train a model for 3D pose estimation from a single image. In particular, our model learns to estimate dense correspondences between images and a prototypical 3D template by predicting, for each pixel in a 2D image, a feature vector of the corresponding vertex in the template mesh. We demonstrate that our method outperforms all baselines at the unsupervised alignment of object-centric videos by a large margin and provides faithful and robust predictions in-the-wild. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/GenIntel/uns-obj-pose3d.

Humans have long been recorded in a variety of forms since antiquity. For example, sculptures and paintings were the primary media for depicting human beings before the invention of cameras. However, most current human-centric computer vision tasks like human pose estimation and human image generation focus exclusively on natural images in the real world. Artificial humans, such as those in sculptures, paintings, and cartoons, are commonly neglected, making existing models fail in these scenarios. As an abstraction of life, art incorporates humans in both natural and artificial scenes. We take advantage of it and introduce the Human-Art dataset to bridge related tasks in natural and artificial scenarios. Specifically, Human-Art contains 50k high-quality images with over 123k person instances from 5 natural and 15 artificial scenarios, which are annotated with bounding boxes, keypoints, self-contact points, and text information for humans represented in both 2D and 3D. It is, therefore, comprehensive and versatile for various downstream tasks. We also provide a rich set of baseline results and detailed analyses for related tasks, including human detection, 2D and 3D human pose estimation, image generation, and motion transfer. As a challenging dataset, we hope Human-Art can provide insights for relevant research and open up new research questions.

Generating high-quality and diverse human images is an important yet challenging task in vision and graphics. However, existing generative models often fall short under the high diversity of clothing shapes and textures. Furthermore, the generation process is even desired to be intuitively controllable for layman users. In this work, we present a text-driven controllable framework, Text2Human, for a high-quality and diverse human generation. We synthesize full-body human images starting from a given human pose with two dedicated steps. 1) With some texts describing the shapes of clothes, the given human pose is first translated to a human parsing map. 2) The final human image is then generated by providing the system with more attributes about the textures of clothes. Specifically, to model the diversity of clothing textures, we build a hierarchical texture-aware codebook that stores multi-scale neural representations for each type of texture. The codebook at the coarse level includes the structural representations of textures, while the codebook at the fine level focuses on the details of textures. To make use of the learned hierarchical codebook to synthesize desired images, a diffusion-based transformer sampler with mixture of experts is firstly employed to sample indices from the coarsest level of the codebook, which then is used to predict the indices of the codebook at finer levels. The predicted indices at different levels are translated to human images by the decoder learned accompanied with hierarchical codebooks. The use of mixture-of-experts allows for the generated image conditioned on the fine-grained text input. The prediction for finer level indices refines the quality of clothing textures. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed framework can generate more diverse and realistic human images compared to state-of-the-art methods.

We present GaussianAvatar, an efficient approach to creating realistic human avatars with dynamic 3D appearances from a single video. We start by introducing animatable 3D Gaussians to explicitly represent humans in various poses and clothing styles. Such an explicit and animatable representation can fuse 3D appearances more efficiently and consistently from 2D observations. Our representation is further augmented with dynamic properties to support pose-dependent appearance modeling, where a dynamic appearance network along with an optimizable feature tensor is designed to learn the motion-to-appearance mapping. Moreover, by leveraging the differentiable motion condition, our method enables a joint optimization of motions and appearances during avatar modeling, which helps to tackle the long-standing issue of inaccurate motion estimation in monocular settings. The efficacy of GaussianAvatar is validated on both the public dataset and our collected dataset, demonstrating its superior performances in terms of appearance quality and rendering efficiency.

This work addresses the problem of real-time rendering of photorealistic human body avatars learned from multi-view videos. While the classical approaches to model and render virtual humans generally use a textured mesh, recent research has developed neural body representations that achieve impressive visual quality. However, these models are difficult to render in real-time and their quality degrades when the character is animated with body poses different than the training observations. We propose an animatable human model based on 3D Gaussian Splatting, that has recently emerged as a very efficient alternative to neural radiance fields. The body is represented by a set of gaussian primitives in a canonical space which is deformed with a coarse to fine approach that combines forward skinning and local non-rigid refinement. We describe how to learn our Human Gaussian Splatting (HuGS) model in an end-to-end fashion from multi-view observations, and evaluate it against the state-of-the-art approaches for novel pose synthesis of clothed body. Our method achieves 1.5 dB PSNR improvement over the state-of-the-art on THuman4 dataset while being able to render in real-time (80 fps for 512x512 resolution).

Parse graphs of the human body can be obtained in the human brain to help humans complete the human pose estimation (HPE). It contains a hierarchical structure, like a tree structure, and context relations among nodes. Many researchers pre-design the parse graph of body structure, and then design framework for HPE. However, these frameworks are difficulty adapting when encountering situations that differ from the preset human structure. Different from them, we regard the feature map as a whole, similarly to human body, so the feature map can be optimized based on parse graphs and each node feature is learned implicitly instead of explicitly, which means it can flexibly respond to different human body structure. In this paper, we design the Refinement Module based on the Parse Graph of feature map (RMPG), which includes two stages: top-down decomposition and bottom-up combination. In the top-down decomposition stage, the feature map is decomposed into multiple sub-feature maps along the channel and their context relations are calculated to obtain their respective context information. In the bottom-up combination stage, the sub-feature maps and their context information are combined to obtain refined sub-feature maps, and then these refined sub-feature maps are concatenated to obtain the refined feature map. Additionally ,we design a top-down framework by using multiple RMPG modules for HPE, some of which are supervised to obtain context relations among body parts. Our framework achieves excellent results on the COCO keypoint detection, CrowdPose and MPII human pose datasets. More importantly, our experiments also demonstrate the effectiveness of RMPG on different methods, including SimpleBaselines, Hourglass, and ViTPose.

In this paper, a novel Diffusion-based 3D Pose estimation (D3DP) method with Joint-wise reProjection-based Multi-hypothesis Aggregation (JPMA) is proposed for probabilistic 3D human pose estimation. On the one hand, D3DP generates multiple possible 3D pose hypotheses for a single 2D observation. It gradually diffuses the ground truth 3D poses to a random distribution, and learns a denoiser conditioned on 2D keypoints to recover the uncontaminated 3D poses. The proposed D3DP is compatible with existing 3D pose estimators and supports users to balance efficiency and accuracy during inference through two customizable parameters. On the other hand, JPMA is proposed to assemble multiple hypotheses generated by D3DP into a single 3D pose for practical use. It reprojects 3D pose hypotheses to the 2D camera plane, selects the best hypothesis joint-by-joint based on the reprojection errors, and combines the selected joints into the final pose. The proposed JPMA conducts aggregation at the joint level and makes use of the 2D prior information, both of which have been overlooked by previous approaches. Extensive experiments on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art deterministic and probabilistic approaches by 1.5% and 8.9%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/paTRICK-swk/D3DP.

As it is hard to calibrate single-view RGB images in the wild, existing 3D human mesh reconstruction (3DHMR) methods either use a constant large focal length or estimate one based on the background environment context, which can not tackle the problem of the torso, limb, hand or face distortion caused by perspective camera projection when the camera is close to the human body. The naive focal length assumptions can harm this task with the incorrectly formulated projection matrices. To solve this, we propose Zolly, the first 3DHMR method focusing on perspective-distorted images. Our approach begins with analysing the reason for perspective distortion, which we find is mainly caused by the relative location of the human body to the camera center. We propose a new camera model and a novel 2D representation, termed distortion image, which describes the 2D dense distortion scale of the human body. We then estimate the distance from distortion scale features rather than environment context features. Afterwards, we integrate the distortion feature with image features to reconstruct the body mesh. To formulate the correct projection matrix and locate the human body position, we simultaneously use perspective and weak-perspective projection loss. Since existing datasets could not handle this task, we propose the first synthetic dataset PDHuman and extend two real-world datasets tailored for this task, all containing perspective-distorted human images. Extensive experiments show that Zolly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on both perspective-distorted datasets and the standard benchmark (3DPW).

Recent advances in neural rendering have improved both training and rendering times by orders of magnitude. While these methods demonstrate state-of-the-art quality and speed, they are designed for photogrammetry of static scenes and do not generalize well to freely moving humans in the environment. In this work, we introduce Human Gaussian Splats (HUGS) that represents an animatable human together with the scene using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our method takes only a monocular video with a small number of (50-100) frames, and it automatically learns to disentangle the static scene and a fully animatable human avatar within 30 minutes. We utilize the SMPL body model to initialize the human Gaussians. To capture details that are not modeled by SMPL (e.g. cloth, hairs), we allow the 3D Gaussians to deviate from the human body model. Utilizing 3D Gaussians for animated humans brings new challenges, including the artifacts created when articulating the Gaussians. We propose to jointly optimize the linear blend skinning weights to coordinate the movements of individual Gaussians during animation. Our approach enables novel-pose synthesis of human and novel view synthesis of both the human and the scene. We achieve state-of-the-art rendering quality with a rendering speed of 60 FPS while being ~100x faster to train over previous work. Our code will be announced here: https://github.com/apple/ml-hugs

Estimating the 3D structure of the human body from natural scenes is a fundamental aspect of visual perception. This task carries great importance for fields like AIGC and human-robot interaction. In practice, 3D human pose estimation in real-world settings is a critical initial step in solving this problem. However, the current datasets, often collected under controlled laboratory conditions using complex motion capture equipment and unvarying backgrounds, are insufficient. The absence of real-world datasets is stalling the progress of this crucial task. To facilitate the development of 3D pose estimation, we present FreeMan, the first large-scale, real-world multi-view dataset. FreeMan was captured by synchronizing 8 smartphones across diverse scenarios. It comprises 11M frames from 8000 sequences, viewed from different perspectives. These sequences cover 40 subjects across 10 different scenarios, each with varying lighting conditions. We have also established an automated, precise labeling pipeline that allows for large-scale processing efficiently. We provide comprehensive evaluation baselines for a range of tasks, underlining the significant challenges posed by FreeMan. Further evaluations of standard indoor/outdoor human sensing datasets reveal that FreeMan offers robust representation transferability in real and complex scenes. FreeMan is now publicly available at https://wangjiongw.github.io/freeman.

Human image animation involves generating videos from a character photo, allowing user control and unlocking potential for video and movie production. While recent approaches yield impressive results using high-quality training data, the inaccessibility of these datasets hampers fair and transparent benchmarking. Moreover, these approaches prioritize 2D human motion and overlook the significance of camera motions in videos, leading to limited control and unstable video generation.To demystify the training data, we present HumanVid, the first large-scale high-quality dataset tailored for human image animation, which combines crafted real-world and synthetic data. For the real-world data, we compile a vast collection of copyright-free real-world videos from the internet. Through a carefully designed rule-based filtering strategy, we ensure the inclusion of high-quality videos, resulting in a collection of 20K human-centric videos in 1080P resolution. Human and camera motion annotation is accomplished using a 2D pose estimator and a SLAM-based method. For the synthetic data, we gather 2,300 copyright-free 3D avatar assets to augment existing available 3D assets. Notably, we introduce a rule-based camera trajectory generation method, enabling the synthetic pipeline to incorporate diverse and precise camera motion annotation, which can rarely be found in real-world data. To verify the effectiveness of HumanVid, we establish a baseline model named CamAnimate, short for Camera-controllable Human Animation, that considers both human and camera motions as conditions. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that such simple baseline training on our HumanVid achieves state-of-the-art performance in controlling both human pose and camera motions, setting a new benchmark. Code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/zhenzhiwang/HumanVid/.

Single-image human reconstruction is vital for digital human modeling applications but remains an extremely challenging task. Current approaches rely on generative models to synthesize multi-view images for subsequent 3D reconstruction and animation. However, directly generating multiple views from a single human image suffers from geometric inconsistencies, resulting in issues like fragmented or blurred limbs in the reconstructed models. To tackle these limitations, we introduce HumanDreamer-X, a novel framework that integrates multi-view human generation and reconstruction into a unified pipeline, which significantly enhances the geometric consistency and visual fidelity of the reconstructed 3D models. In this framework, 3D Gaussian Splatting serves as an explicit 3D representation to provide initial geometry and appearance priority. Building upon this foundation, HumanFixer is trained to restore 3DGS renderings, which guarantee photorealistic results. Furthermore, we delve into the inherent challenges associated with attention mechanisms in multi-view human generation, and propose an attention modulation strategy that effectively enhances geometric details identity consistency across multi-view. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach markedly improves generation and reconstruction PSNR quality metrics by 16.45% and 12.65%, respectively, achieving a PSNR of up to 25.62 dB, while also showing generalization capabilities on in-the-wild data and applicability to various human reconstruction backbone models.

Training state-of-the-art models for human pose estimation in videos requires datasets with annotations that are really hard and expensive to obtain. Although transformers have been recently utilized for body pose sequence modeling, related methods rely on pseudo-ground truth to augment the currently limited training data available for learning such models. In this paper, we introduce PoseBERT, a transformer module that is fully trained on 3D Motion Capture (MoCap) data via masked modeling. It is simple, generic and versatile, as it can be plugged on top of any image-based model to transform it in a video-based model leveraging temporal information. We showcase variants of PoseBERT with different inputs varying from 3D skeleton keypoints to rotations of a 3D parametric model for either the full body (SMPL) or just the hands (MANO). Since PoseBERT training is task agnostic, the model can be applied to several tasks such as pose refinement, future pose prediction or motion completion without finetuning. Our experimental results validate that adding PoseBERT on top of various state-of-the-art pose estimation methods consistently improves their performances, while its low computational cost allows us to use it in a real-time demo for smoothly animating a robotic hand via a webcam. Test code and models are available at https://github.com/naver/posebert.

Personalized 3D avatars require an animatable representation of digital humans. Doing so instantly from monocular videos offers scalability to broad class of users and wide-scale applications. In this paper, we present a fast, simple, yet effective method for creating animatable 3D digital humans from monocular videos. Our method utilizes the efficiency of Gaussian splatting to model both 3D geometry and appearance. However, we observed that naively optimizing Gaussian splats results in inaccurate geometry, thereby leading to poor animations. This work achieves and illustrates the need of accurate 3D mesh-type modelling of the human body for animatable digitization through Gaussian splats. This is achieved by developing a novel pipeline that benefits from three key aspects: (a) implicit modelling of surface's displacements and the color's spherical harmonics; (b) binding of 3D Gaussians to the respective triangular faces of the body template; (c) a novel technique to render normals followed by their auxiliary supervision. Our exhaustive experiments on three different benchmark datasets demonstrates the state-of-the-art results of our method, in limited time settings. In fact, our method is faster by an order of magnitude (in terms of training time) than its closest competitor. At the same time, we achieve superior rendering and 3D reconstruction performance under the change of poses.

We propose RANA, a relightable and articulated neural avatar for the photorealistic synthesis of humans under arbitrary viewpoints, body poses, and lighting. We only require a short video clip of the person to create the avatar and assume no knowledge about the lighting environment. We present a novel framework to model humans while disentangling their geometry, texture, and also lighting environment from monocular RGB videos. To simplify this otherwise ill-posed task we first estimate the coarse geometry and texture of the person via SMPL+D model fitting and then learn an articulated neural representation for photorealistic image generation. RANA first generates the normal and albedo maps of the person in any given target body pose and then uses spherical harmonics lighting to generate the shaded image in the target lighting environment. We also propose to pretrain RANA using synthetic images and demonstrate that it leads to better disentanglement between geometry and texture while also improving robustness to novel body poses. Finally, we also present a new photorealistic synthetic dataset, Relighting Humans, to quantitatively evaluate the performance of the proposed approach.

Expressive human pose and shape estimation (a.k.a. 3D whole-body mesh recovery) involves the human body, hand, and expression estimation. Most existing methods have tackled this task in a two-stage manner, first detecting the human body part with an off-the-shelf detection model and inferring the different human body parts individually. Despite the impressive results achieved, these methods suffer from 1) loss of valuable contextual information via cropping, 2) introducing distractions, and 3) lacking inter-association among different persons and body parts, inevitably causing performance degradation, especially for crowded scenes. To address these issues, we introduce a novel all-in-one-stage framework, AiOS, for multiple expressive human pose and shape recovery without an additional human detection step. Specifically, our method is built upon DETR, which treats multi-person whole-body mesh recovery task as a progressive set prediction problem with various sequential detection. We devise the decoder tokens and extend them to our task. Specifically, we first employ a human token to probe a human location in the image and encode global features for each instance, which provides a coarse location for the later transformer block. Then, we introduce a joint-related token to probe the human joint in the image and encoder a fine-grained local feature, which collaborates with the global feature to regress the whole-body mesh. This straightforward but effective model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a 9% reduction in NMVE on AGORA, a 30% reduction in PVE on EHF, a 10% reduction in PVE on ARCTIC, and a 3% reduction in PVE on EgoBody.

Unsupervised learning of 3D-aware generative adversarial networks has lately made much progress. Some recent work demonstrates promising results of learning human generative models using neural articulated radiance fields, yet their generalization ability and controllability lag behind parametric human models, i.e., they do not perform well when generalizing to novel pose/shape and are not part controllable. To solve these problems, we propose VeRi3D, a generative human vertex-based radiance field parameterized by vertices of the parametric human template, SMPL. We map each 3D point to the local coordinate system defined on its neighboring vertices, and use the corresponding vertex feature and local coordinates for mapping it to color and density values. We demonstrate that our simple approach allows for generating photorealistic human images with free control over camera pose, human pose, shape, as well as enabling part-level editing.

Human parsing and pose estimation have recently received considerable interest due to their substantial application potentials. However, the existing datasets have limited numbers of images and annotations and lack a variety of human appearances and coverage of challenging cases in unconstrained environments. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark named "Look into Person (LIP)" that provides a significant advancement in terms of scalability, diversity, and difficulty, which are crucial for future developments in human-centric analysis. This comprehensive dataset contains over 50,000 elaborately annotated images with 19 semantic part labels and 16 body joints, which are captured from a broad range of viewpoints, occlusions, and background complexities. Using these rich annotations, we perform detailed analyses of the leading human parsing and pose estimation approaches, thereby obtaining insights into the successes and failures of these methods. To further explore and take advantage of the semantic correlation of these two tasks, we propose a novel joint human parsing and pose estimation network to explore efficient context modeling, which can simultaneously predict parsing and pose with extremely high quality. Furthermore, we simplify the network to solve human parsing by exploring a novel self-supervised structure-sensitive learning approach, which imposes human pose structures into the parsing results without resorting to extra supervision. The dataset, code and models are available at http://www.sysu-hcp.net/lip/.

In this paper we focus on inserting a given human (specifically, a single image of a person) into a novel scene. Our method, which builds on top of Stable Diffusion, yields natural looking images while being highly controllable with text and pose. To accomplish this we need to train on pairs of images, the first a reference image with the person, the second a "target image" showing the same person (with a different pose and possibly in a different background). Additionally we require a text caption describing the new pose relative to that in the reference image. In this paper we present a novel dataset following this criteria, which we create using pairs of frames from human-centric and action-rich videos and employing a multimodal LLM to automatically summarize the difference in human pose for the text captions. We demonstrate that identity preservation is a more challenging task in scenes "in-the-wild", and especially scenes where there is an interaction between persons and objects. Combining the weak supervision from noisy captions, with robust 2D pose improves the quality of person-object interactions.

Generating animatable human avatars from a single image is essential for various digital human modeling applications. Existing 3D reconstruction methods often struggle to capture fine details in animatable models, while generative approaches for controllable animation, though avoiding explicit 3D modeling, suffer from viewpoint inconsistencies in extreme poses and computational inefficiencies. In this paper, we address these challenges by leveraging the power of generative models to produce detailed multi-view canonical pose images, which help resolve ambiguities in animatable human reconstruction. We then propose a robust method for 3D reconstruction of inconsistent images, enabling real-time rendering during inference. Specifically, we adapt a transformer-based video generation model to generate multi-view canonical pose images and normal maps, pretraining on a large-scale video dataset to improve generalization. To handle view inconsistencies, we recast the reconstruction problem as a 4D task and introduce an efficient 3D modeling approach using 4D Gaussian Splatting. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves photorealistic, real-time animation of 3D human avatars from in-the-wild images, showcasing its effectiveness and generalization capability.

We present DINAR, an approach for creating realistic rigged fullbody avatars from single RGB images. Similarly to previous works, our method uses neural textures combined with the SMPL-X body model to achieve photo-realistic quality of avatars while keeping them easy to animate and fast to infer. To restore the texture, we use a latent diffusion model and show how such model can be trained in the neural texture space. The use of the diffusion model allows us to realistically reconstruct large unseen regions such as the back of a person given the frontal view. The models in our pipeline are trained using 2D images and videos only. In the experiments, our approach achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality and good generalization to new poses and viewpoints. In particular, the approach improves state-of-the-art on the SnapshotPeople public benchmark.

In this paper, we propose ARCH (Animatable Reconstruction of Clothed Humans), a novel end-to-end framework for accurate reconstruction of animation-ready 3D clothed humans from a monocular image. Existing approaches to digitize 3D humans struggle to handle pose variations and recover details. Also, they do not produce models that are animation ready. In contrast, ARCH is a learned pose-aware model that produces detailed 3D rigged full-body human avatars from a single unconstrained RGB image. A Semantic Space and a Semantic Deformation Field are created using a parametric 3D body estimator. They allow the transformation of 2D/3D clothed humans into a canonical space, reducing ambiguities in geometry caused by pose variations and occlusions in training data. Detailed surface geometry and appearance are learned using an implicit function representation with spatial local features. Furthermore, we propose additional per-pixel supervision on the 3D reconstruction using opacity-aware differentiable rendering. Our experiments indicate that ARCH increases the fidelity of the reconstructed humans. We obtain more than 50% lower reconstruction errors for standard metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods on public datasets. We also show numerous qualitative examples of animated, high-quality reconstructed avatars unseen in the literature so far.

Human pose plays a crucial role in the digital age. While recent works have achieved impressive progress in understanding and generating human poses, they often support only a single modality of control signals and operate in isolation, limiting their application in real-world scenarios. This paper presents UniPose, a framework employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend, generate, and edit human poses across various modalities, including images, text, and 3D SMPL poses. Specifically, we apply a pose tokenizer to convert 3D poses into discrete pose tokens, enabling seamless integration into the LLM within a unified vocabulary. To further enhance the fine-grained pose perception capabilities, we facilitate UniPose with a mixture of visual encoders, among them a pose-specific visual encoder. Benefiting from a unified learning strategy, UniPose effectively transfers knowledge across different pose-relevant tasks, adapts to unseen tasks, and exhibits extended capabilities. This work serves as the first attempt at building a general-purpose framework for pose comprehension, generation, and editing. Extensive experiments highlight UniPose's competitive and even superior performance across various pose-relevant tasks.

Nuanced expressiveness, particularly through fine-grained hand and facial expressions, is pivotal for enhancing the realism and vitality of digital human representations. In this work, we focus on investigating the expressiveness of human avatars when learned from monocular RGB video; a setting that introduces new challenges in capturing and animating fine-grained details. To this end, we introduce EVA, a drivable human model that meticulously sculpts fine details based on 3D Gaussians and SMPL-X, an expressive parametric human model. Focused on enhancing expressiveness, our work makes three key contributions. First, we highlight the critical importance of aligning the SMPL-X model with RGB frames for effective avatar learning. Recognizing the limitations of current SMPL-X prediction methods for in-the-wild videos, we introduce a plug-and-play module that significantly ameliorates misalignment issues. Second, we propose a context-aware adaptive density control strategy, which is adaptively adjusting the gradient thresholds to accommodate the varied granularity across body parts. Last but not least, we develop a feedback mechanism that predicts per-pixel confidence to better guide the learning of 3D Gaussians. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our framework both quantitatively and qualitatively, especially on the fine-grained hand and facial details. See the project website at https://evahuman.github.io

In this paper, we introduce DirectorLLM, a novel video generation model that employs a large language model (LLM) to orchestrate human poses within videos. As foundational text-to-video models rapidly evolve, the demand for high-quality human motion and interaction grows. To address this need and enhance the authenticity of human motions, we extend the LLM from a text generator to a video director and human motion simulator. Utilizing open-source resources from Llama 3, we train the DirectorLLM to generate detailed instructional signals, such as human poses, to guide video generation. This approach offloads the simulation of human motion from the video generator to the LLM, effectively creating informative outlines for human-centric scenes. These signals are used as conditions by the video renderer, facilitating more realistic and prompt-following video generation. As an independent LLM module, it can be applied to different video renderers, including UNet and DiT, with minimal effort. Experiments on automatic evaluation benchmarks and human evaluations show that our model outperforms existing ones in generating videos with higher human motion fidelity, improved prompt faithfulness, and enhanced rendered subject naturalness.

Creating controllable, photorealistic, and geometrically detailed digital doubles of real humans solely from video data is a key challenge in Computer Graphics and Vision, especially when real-time performance is required. Recent methods attach a neural radiance field (NeRF) to an articulated structure, e.g., a body model or a skeleton, to map points into a pose canonical space while conditioning the NeRF on the skeletal pose. These approaches typically parameterize the neural field with a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) leading to a slow runtime. To address this drawback, we propose TriHuman a novel human-tailored, deformable, and efficient tri-plane representation, which achieves real-time performance, state-of-the-art pose-controllable geometry synthesis as well as photorealistic rendering quality. At the core, we non-rigidly warp global ray samples into our undeformed tri-plane texture space, which effectively addresses the problem of global points being mapped to the same tri-plane locations. We then show how such a tri-plane feature representation can be conditioned on the skeletal motion to account for dynamic appearance and geometry changes. Our results demonstrate a clear step towards higher quality in terms of geometry and appearance modeling of humans as well as runtime performance.

We propose a method to estimate 3D human poses from substantially blurred images. The key idea is to tackle the inverse problem of image deblurring by modeling the forward problem with a 3D human model, a texture map, and a sequence of poses to describe human motion. The blurring process is then modeled by a temporal image aggregation step. Using a differentiable renderer, we can solve the inverse problem by backpropagating the pixel-wise reprojection error to recover the best human motion representation that explains a single or multiple input images. Since the image reconstruction loss alone is insufficient, we present additional regularization terms. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first method to tackle this problem. Our method consistently outperforms other methods on significantly blurry inputs since they lack one or multiple key functionalities that our method unifies, i.e. image deblurring with sub-frame accuracy and explicit 3D modeling of non-rigid human motion.

The task of human reposing involves generating a realistic image of a person standing in an arbitrary conceivable pose. There are multiple difficulties in generating perceptually accurate images, and existing methods suffer from limitations in preserving texture, maintaining pattern coherence, respecting cloth boundaries, handling occlusions, manipulating skin generation, etc. These difficulties are further exacerbated by the fact that the possible space of pose orientation for humans is large and variable, the nature of clothing items is highly non-rigid, and the diversity in body shape differs largely among the population. To alleviate these difficulties and synthesize perceptually accurate images, we propose VGFlow. Our model uses a visibility-guided flow module to disentangle the flow into visible and invisible parts of the target for simultaneous texture preservation and style manipulation. Furthermore, to tackle distinct body shapes and avoid network artifacts, we also incorporate a self-supervised patch-wise "realness" loss to improve the output. VGFlow achieves state-of-the-art results as observed qualitatively and quantitatively on different image quality metrics (SSIM, LPIPS, FID).

In this work we integrate ideas from surface-based modeling with neural synthesis: we propose a combination of surface-based pose estimation and deep generative models that allows us to perform accurate pose transfer, i.e. synthesize a new image of a person based on a single image of that person and the image of a pose donor. We use a dense pose estimation system that maps pixels from both images to a common surface-based coordinate system, allowing the two images to be brought in correspondence with each other. We inpaint and refine the source image intensities in the surface coordinate system, prior to warping them onto the target pose. These predictions are fused with those of a convolutional predictive module through a neural synthesis module allowing for training the whole pipeline jointly end-to-end, optimizing a combination of adversarial and perceptual losses. We show that dense pose estimation is a substantially more powerful conditioning input than landmark-, or mask-based alternatives, and report systematic improvements over state of the art generators on DeepFashion and MVC datasets.

Generating multi-view human images from a single view is a complex and significant challenge. Although recent advancements in multi-view object generation have shown impressive results with diffusion models, novel view synthesis for humans remains constrained by the limited availability of 3D human datasets. Consequently, many existing models struggle to produce realistic human body shapes or capture fine-grained facial details accurately. To address these issues, we propose an innovative framework that leverages transferred body and facial representations for multi-view human synthesis. Specifically, we use a single-view model pretrained on a large-scale human dataset to develop a multi-view body representation, aiming to extend the 2D knowledge of the single-view model to a multi-view diffusion model. Additionally, to enhance the model's detail restoration capability, we integrate transferred multimodal facial features into our trained human diffusion model. Experimental evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior performance in multi-view human synthesis.

Despite significant advances in large-scale text-to-image models, achieving hyper-realistic human image generation remains a desirable yet unsolved task. Existing models like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2 tend to generate human images with incoherent parts or unnatural poses. To tackle these challenges, our key insight is that human image is inherently structural over multiple granularities, from the coarse-level body skeleton to fine-grained spatial geometry. Therefore, capturing such correlations between the explicit appearance and latent structure in one model is essential to generate coherent and natural human images. To this end, we propose a unified framework, HyperHuman, that generates in-the-wild human images of high realism and diverse layouts. Specifically, 1) we first build a large-scale human-centric dataset, named HumanVerse, which consists of 340M images with comprehensive annotations like human pose, depth, and surface normal. 2) Next, we propose a Latent Structural Diffusion Model that simultaneously denoises the depth and surface normal along with the synthesized RGB image. Our model enforces the joint learning of image appearance, spatial relationship, and geometry in a unified network, where each branch in the model complements to each other with both structural awareness and textural richness. 3) Finally, to further boost the visual quality, we propose a Structure-Guided Refiner to compose the predicted conditions for more detailed generation of higher resolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework yields the state-of-the-art performance, generating hyper-realistic human images under diverse scenarios. Project Page: https://snap-research.github.io/HyperHuman/

Pose Machines provide a sequential prediction framework for learning rich implicit spatial models. In this work we show a systematic design for how convolutional networks can be incorporated into the pose machine framework for learning image features and image-dependent spatial models for the task of pose estimation. The contribution of this paper is to implicitly model long-range dependencies between variables in structured prediction tasks such as articulated pose estimation. We achieve this by designing a sequential architecture composed of convolutional networks that directly operate on belief maps from previous stages, producing increasingly refined estimates for part locations, without the need for explicit graphical model-style inference. Our approach addresses the characteristic difficulty of vanishing gradients during training by providing a natural learning objective function that enforces intermediate supervision, thereby replenishing back-propagated gradients and conditioning the learning procedure. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and outperform competing methods on standard benchmarks including the MPII, LSP, and FLIC datasets.

In this paper, we focus on the task of generalizable neural human rendering which trains conditional Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) from multi-view videos of different characters. To handle the dynamic human motion, previous methods have primarily used a SparseConvNet (SPC)-based human representation to process the painted SMPL. However, such SPC-based representation i) optimizes under the volatile observation space which leads to the pose-misalignment between training and inference stages, and ii) lacks the global relationships among human parts that is critical for handling the incomplete painted SMPL. Tackling these issues, we present a brand-new framework named TransHuman, which learns the painted SMPL under the canonical space and captures the global relationships between human parts with transformers. Specifically, TransHuman is mainly composed of Transformer-based Human Encoding (TransHE), Deformable Partial Radiance Fields (DPaRF), and Fine-grained Detail Integration (FDI). TransHE first processes the painted SMPL under the canonical space via transformers for capturing the global relationships between human parts. Then, DPaRF binds each output token with a deformable radiance field for encoding the query point under the observation space. Finally, the FDI is employed to further integrate fine-grained information from reference images. Extensive experiments on ZJU-MoCap and H36M show that our TransHuman achieves a significantly new state-of-the-art performance with high efficiency. Project page: https://pansanity666.github.io/TransHuman/

Estimating the 6-DoF pose of a rigid object from a single RGB image is a crucial yet challenging task. Recent studies have shown the great potential of dense correspondence-based solutions, yet improvements are still needed to reach practical deployment. In this paper, we propose a novel pose estimation algorithm named CheckerPose, which improves on three main aspects. Firstly, CheckerPose densely samples 3D keypoints from the surface of the 3D object and finds their 2D correspondences progressively in the 2D image. Compared to previous solutions that conduct dense sampling in the image space, our strategy enables the correspondence searching in a 2D grid (i.e., pixel coordinate). Secondly, for our 3D-to-2D correspondence, we design a compact binary code representation for 2D image locations. This representation not only allows for progressive correspondence refinement but also converts the correspondence regression to a more efficient classification problem. Thirdly, we adopt a graph neural network to explicitly model the interactions among the sampled 3D keypoints, further boosting the reliability and accuracy of the correspondences. Together, these novel components make CheckerPose a strong pose estimation algorithm. When evaluated on the popular Linemod, Linemod-O, and YCB-V object pose estimation benchmarks, CheckerPose clearly boosts the accuracy of correspondence-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art performances. Code is available at https://github.com/RuyiLian/CheckerPose.

Existing person image generative models can do either image generation or pose transfer but not both. We propose a unified diffusion model, UPGPT to provide a universal solution to perform all the person image tasks - generative, pose transfer, and editing. With fine-grained multimodality and disentanglement capabilities, our approach offers fine-grained control over the generation and the editing process of images using a combination of pose, text, and image, all without needing a semantic segmentation mask which can be challenging to obtain or edit. We also pioneer the parameterized body SMPL model in pose-guided person image generation to demonstrate new capability - simultaneous pose and camera view interpolation while maintaining a person's appearance. Results on the benchmark DeepFashion dataset show that UPGPT is the new state-of-the-art while simultaneously pioneering new capabilities of edit and pose transfer in human image generation.

Expressive human pose and shape estimation (EHPS) unifies body, hands, and face motion capture with numerous applications. Despite encouraging progress, current state-of-the-art methods focus on training innovative architectural designs on confined datasets. In this work, we investigate the impact of scaling up EHPS towards a family of generalist foundation models. 1) For data scaling, we perform a systematic investigation on 40 EHPS datasets, encompassing a wide range of scenarios that a model trained on any single dataset cannot handle. More importantly, capitalizing on insights obtained from the extensive benchmarking process, we optimize our training scheme and select datasets that lead to a significant leap in EHPS capabilities. Ultimately, we achieve diminishing returns at 10M training instances from diverse data sources. 2) For model scaling, we take advantage of vision transformers (up to ViT-Huge as the backbone) to study the scaling law of model sizes in EHPS. To exclude the influence of algorithmic design, we base our experiments on two minimalist architectures: SMPLer-X, which consists of an intermediate step for hand and face localization, and SMPLest-X, an even simpler version that reduces the network to its bare essentials and highlights significant advances in the capture of articulated hands. With big data and the large model, the foundation models exhibit strong performance across diverse test benchmarks and excellent transferability to even unseen environments. Moreover, our finetuning strategy turns the generalist into specialist models, allowing them to achieve further performance boosts. Notably, our foundation models consistently deliver state-of-the-art results on seven benchmarks such as AGORA, UBody, EgoBody, and our proposed SynHand dataset for comprehensive hand evaluation. (Code is available at: https://github.com/wqyin/SMPLest-X).

Detailed and photorealistic 3D human modeling is essential for various applications and has seen tremendous progress. However, full-body reconstruction from a monocular RGB image remains challenging due to the ill-posed nature of the problem and sophisticated clothing topology with self-occlusions. In this paper, we propose PSHuman, a novel framework that explicitly reconstructs human meshes utilizing priors from the multiview diffusion model. It is found that directly applying multiview diffusion on single-view human images leads to severe geometric distortions, especially on generated faces. To address it, we propose a cross-scale diffusion that models the joint probability distribution of global full-body shape and local facial characteristics, enabling detailed and identity-preserved novel-view generation without any geometric distortion. Moreover, to enhance cross-view body shape consistency of varied human poses, we condition the generative model on parametric models like SMPL-X, which provide body priors and prevent unnatural views inconsistent with human anatomy. Leveraging the generated multi-view normal and color images, we present SMPLX-initialized explicit human carving to recover realistic textured human meshes efficiently. Extensive experimental results and quantitative evaluations on CAPE and THuman2.1 datasets demonstrate PSHumans superiority in geometry details, texture fidelity, and generalization capability.

Current methods for learning realistic and animatable 3D clothed avatars need either posed 3D scans or 2D images with carefully controlled user poses. In contrast, our goal is to learn an avatar from only 2D images of people in unconstrained poses. Given a set of images, our method estimates a detailed 3D surface from each image and then combines these into an animatable avatar. Implicit functions are well suited to the first task, as they can capture details like hair and clothes. Current methods, however, are not robust to varied human poses and often produce 3D surfaces with broken or disembodied limbs, missing details, or non-human shapes. The problem is that these methods use global feature encoders that are sensitive to global pose. To address this, we propose ICON ("Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals"), which, instead, uses local features. ICON has two main modules, both of which exploit the SMPL(-X) body model. First, ICON infers detailed clothed-human normals (front/back) conditioned on the SMPL(-X) normals. Second, a visibility-aware implicit surface regressor produces an iso-surface of a human occupancy field. Importantly, at inference time, a feedback loop alternates between refining the SMPL(-X) mesh using the inferred clothed normals and then refining the normals. Given multiple reconstructed frames of a subject in varied poses, we use SCANimate to produce an animatable avatar from them. Evaluation on the AGORA and CAPE datasets shows that ICON outperforms the state of the art in reconstruction, even with heavily limited training data. Additionally, it is much more robust to out-of-distribution samples, e.g., in-the-wild poses/images and out-of-frame cropping. ICON takes a step towards robust 3D clothed human reconstruction from in-the-wild images. This enables creating avatars directly from video with personalized and natural pose-dependent cloth deformation.

Numerous pose-guided human editing methods have been explored by the vision community due to their extensive practical applications. However, most of these methods still use an image-to-image formulation in which a single image is given as input to produce an edited image as output. This objective becomes ill-defined in cases when the target pose differs significantly from the input pose. Existing methods then resort to in-painting or style transfer to handle occlusions and preserve content. In this paper, we explore the utilization of multiple views to minimize the issue of missing information and generate an accurate representation of the underlying human model. To fuse knowledge from multiple viewpoints, we design a multi-view fusion network that takes the pose key points and texture from multiple source images and generates an explainable per-pixel appearance retrieval map. Thereafter, the encodings from a separate network (trained on a single-view human reposing task) are merged in the latent space. This enables us to generate accurate, precise, and visually coherent images for different editing tasks. We show the application of our network on two newly proposed tasks - Multi-view human reposing and Mix&Match Human Image generation. Additionally, we study the limitations of single-view editing and scenarios in which multi-view provides a better alternative.

We address the problem of fitting a parametric human body model (SMPL) to point cloud data. Optimization-based methods require careful initialization and are prone to becoming trapped in local optima. Learning-based methods address this but do not generalize well when the input pose is far from those seen during training. For rigid point clouds, remarkable generalization has been achieved by leveraging SE(3)-equivariant networks, but these methods do not work on articulated objects. In this work we extend this idea to human bodies and propose ArtEq, a novel part-based SE(3)-equivariant neural architecture for SMPL model estimation from point clouds. Specifically, we learn a part detection network by leveraging local SO(3) invariance, and regress shape and pose using articulated SE(3) shape-invariant and pose-equivariant networks, all trained end-to-end. Our novel pose regression module leverages the permutation-equivariant property of self-attention layers to preserve rotational equivariance. Experimental results show that ArtEq generalizes to poses not seen during training, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by ~44% in terms of body reconstruction accuracy, without requiring an optimization refinement step. Furthermore, ArtEq is three orders of magnitude faster during inference than prior work and has 97.3% fewer parameters. The code and model are available for research purposes at https://arteq.is.tue.mpg.de.

Supervised deep learning with pixel-wise training labels has great successes on multi-person part segmentation. However, data labeling at pixel-level is very expensive. To solve the problem, people have been exploring to use synthetic data to avoid the data labeling. Although it is easy to generate labels for synthetic data, the results are much worse compared to those using real data and manual labeling. The degradation of the performance is mainly due to the domain gap, i.e., the discrepancy of the pixel value statistics between real and synthetic data. In this paper, we observe that real and synthetic humans both have a skeleton (pose) representation. We found that the skeletons can effectively bridge the synthetic and real domains during the training. Our proposed approach takes advantage of the rich and realistic variations of the real data and the easily obtainable labels of the synthetic data to learn multi-person part segmentation on real images without any human-annotated labels. Through experiments, we show that without any human labeling, our method performs comparably to several state-of-the-art approaches which require human labeling on Pascal-Person-Parts and COCO-DensePose datasets. On the other hand, if part labels are also available in the real-images during training, our method outperforms the supervised state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. We further demonstrate the generalizability of our method on predicting novel keypoints in real images where no real data labels are available for the novel keypoints detection. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/kevinlin311tw/CDCL-human-part-segmentation

A common approach to localize 3D human joints in a synchronized and calibrated multi-view setup consists of two-steps: (1) apply a 2D detector separately on each view to localize joints in 2D, and (2) perform robust triangulation on 2D detections from each view to acquire the 3D joint locations. However, in step 1, the 2D detector is limited to solving challenging cases which could potentially be better resolved in 3D, such as occlusions and oblique viewing angles, purely in 2D without leveraging any 3D information. Therefore, we propose the differentiable "epipolar transformer", which enables the 2D detector to leverage 3D-aware features to improve 2D pose estimation. The intuition is: given a 2D location p in the current view, we would like to first find its corresponding point p' in a neighboring view, and then combine the features at p' with the features at p, thus leading to a 3D-aware feature at p. Inspired by stereo matching, the epipolar transformer leverages epipolar constraints and feature matching to approximate the features at p'. Experiments on InterHand and Human3.6M show that our approach has consistent improvements over the baselines. Specifically, in the condition where no external data is used, our Human3.6M model trained with ResNet-50 backbone and image size 256 x 256 outperforms state-of-the-art by 4.23 mm and achieves MPJPE 26.9 mm.

Recent contributions have demonstrated that it is possible to recognize the pose of humans densely and accurately given a large dataset of poses annotated in detail. In principle, the same approach could be extended to any animal class, but the effort required for collecting new annotations for each case makes this strategy impractical, despite important applications in natural conservation, science and business. We show that, at least for proximal animal classes such as chimpanzees, it is possible to transfer the knowledge existing in dense pose recognition for humans, as well as in more general object detectors and segmenters, to the problem of dense pose recognition in other classes. We do this by (1) establishing a DensePose model for the new animal which is also geometrically aligned to humans (2) introducing a multi-head R-CNN architecture that facilitates transfer of multiple recognition tasks between classes, (3) finding which combination of known classes can be transferred most effectively to the new animal and (4) using self-calibrated uncertainty heads to generate pseudo-labels graded by quality for training a model for this class. We also introduce two benchmark datasets labelled in the manner of DensePose for the class chimpanzee and use them to evaluate our approach, showing excellent transfer learning performance.

In this work, we show that synthetic data created by generative models is complementary to computer graphics (CG) rendered data for achieving remarkable generalization performance on diverse real-world scenes for 3D human pose and shape estimation (HPS). Specifically, we propose an effective approach based on recent diffusion models, termed HumanWild, which can effortlessly generate human images and corresponding 3D mesh annotations. We first collect a large-scale human-centric dataset with comprehensive annotations, e.g., text captions and surface normal images. Then, we train a customized ControlNet model upon this dataset to generate diverse human images and initial ground-truth labels. At the core of this step is that we can easily obtain numerous surface normal images from a 3D human parametric model, e.g., SMPL-X, by rendering the 3D mesh onto the image plane. As there exists inevitable noise in the initial labels, we then apply an off-the-shelf foundation segmentation model, i.e., SAM, to filter negative data samples. Our data generation pipeline is flexible and customizable to facilitate different real-world tasks, e.g., ego-centric scenes and perspective-distortion scenes. The generated dataset comprises 0.79M images with corresponding 3D annotations, covering versatile viewpoints, scenes, and human identities. We train various HPS regressors on top of the generated data and evaluate them on a wide range of benchmarks (3DPW, RICH, EgoBody, AGORA, SSP-3D) to verify the effectiveness of the generated data. By exclusively employing generative models, we generate large-scale in-the-wild human images and high-quality annotations, eliminating the need for real-world data collection.

Egocentric human body estimation allows for the inference of user body pose and shape from a wearable camera's first-person perspective. Although research has used pose estimation techniques to overcome self-occlusions and image distortions caused by head-mounted fisheye images, similar advances in 3D human mesh recovery (HMR) techniques have been limited. We introduce Fish2Mesh, a fisheye-aware transformer-based model designed for 3D egocentric human mesh recovery. We propose an egocentric position embedding block to generate an ego-specific position table for the Swin Transformer to reduce fisheye image distortion. Our model utilizes multi-task heads for SMPL parametric regression and camera translations, estimating 3D and 2D joints as auxiliary loss to support model training. To address the scarcity of egocentric camera data, we create a training dataset by employing the pre-trained 4D-Human model and third-person cameras for weak supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that Fish2Mesh outperforms previous state-of-the-art 3D HMR models.

Recent work has showcased the significant potential of diffusion models in pose-guided person image synthesis. However, owing to the inconsistency in pose between the source and target images, synthesizing an image with a distinct pose, relying exclusively on the source image and target pose information, remains a formidable challenge. This paper presents Progressive Conditional Diffusion Models (PCDMs) that incrementally bridge the gap between person images under the target and source poses through three stages. Specifically, in the first stage, we design a simple prior conditional diffusion model that predicts the global features of the target image by mining the global alignment relationship between pose coordinates and image appearance. Then, the second stage establishes a dense correspondence between the source and target images using the global features from the previous stage, and an inpainting conditional diffusion model is proposed to further align and enhance the contextual features, generating a coarse-grained person image. In the third stage, we propose a refining conditional diffusion model to utilize the coarsely generated image from the previous stage as a condition, achieving texture restoration and enhancing fine-detail consistency. The three-stage PCDMs work progressively to generate the final high-quality and high-fidelity synthesized image. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the consistency and photorealism of our proposed PCDMs under challenging scenarios.The code and model will be available at https://github.com/muzishen/PCDMs.

We introduce ChatPose, a framework employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand and reason about 3D human poses from images or textual descriptions. Our work is motivated by the human ability to intuitively understand postures from a single image or a brief description, a process that intertwines image interpretation, world knowledge, and an understanding of body language. Traditional human pose estimation and generation methods often operate in isolation, lacking semantic understanding and reasoning abilities. ChatPose addresses these limitations by embedding SMPL poses as distinct signal tokens within a multimodal LLM, enabling the direct generation of 3D body poses from both textual and visual inputs. Leveraging the powerful capabilities of multimodal LLMs, ChatPose unifies classical 3D human pose and generation tasks while offering user interactions. Additionally, ChatPose empowers LLMs to apply their extensive world knowledge in reasoning about human poses, leading to two advanced tasks: speculative pose generation and reasoning about pose estimation. These tasks involve reasoning about humans to generate 3D poses from subtle text queries, possibly accompanied by images. We establish benchmarks for these tasks, moving beyond traditional 3D pose generation and estimation methods. Our results show that ChatPose outperforms existing multimodal LLMs and task-specific methods on these newly proposed tasks. Furthermore, ChatPose's ability to understand and generate 3D human poses based on complex reasoning opens new directions in human pose analysis.

In this paper, we highlight a critical yet often overlooked factor in most 3D human tasks, namely modeling humans with complex garments. It is known that the parameterized formulation of SMPL is able to fit human skin; while complex garments, e.g., hand-held objects and loose-fitting garments, are difficult to get modeled within the unified framework, since their movements are usually decoupled with the human body. To enhance the capability of SMPL skeleton in response to this situation, we propose a modular growth strategy that enables the joint tree of the skeleton to expand adaptively. Specifically, our method, called ToMiE, consists of parent joints localization and external joints optimization. For parent joints localization, we employ a gradient-based approach guided by both LBS blending weights and motion kernels. Once the external joints are obtained, we proceed to optimize their transformations in SE(3) across different frames, enabling rendering and explicit animation. ToMiE manages to outperform other methods across various cases with garments, not only in rendering quality but also by offering free animation of grown joints, thereby enhancing the expressive ability of SMPL skeleton for a broader range of applications.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of scene-aware 3D human motion forecasting. A key challenge of this task is to predict future human motions that are consistent with the scene by modeling the human-scene interactions. While recent works have demonstrated that explicit constraints on human-scene interactions can prevent the occurrence of ghost motion, they only provide constraints on partial human motion e.g., the global motion of the human or a few joints contacting the scene, leaving the rest of the motion unconstrained. To address this limitation, we propose to model the human-scene interaction with the mutual distance between the human body and the scene. Such mutual distances constrain both the local and global human motion, resulting in a whole-body motion constrained prediction. In particular, mutual distance constraints consist of two components, the signed distance of each vertex on the human mesh to the scene surface and the distance of basis scene points to the human mesh. We further introduce a global scene representation learned from a signed distance function (SDF) volume to ensure coherence between the global scene representation and the explicit constraint from the mutual distance. We develop a pipeline with two sequential steps: predicting the future mutual distances first, followed by forecasting future human motion. During training, we explicitly encourage consistency between predicted poses and mutual distances. Extensive evaluations on the existing synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Animatable 3D human reconstruction from a single image is a challenging problem due to the ambiguity in decoupling geometry, appearance, and deformation. Recent advances in 3D human reconstruction mainly focus on static human modeling, and the reliance of using synthetic 3D scans for training limits their generalization ability. Conversely, optimization-based video methods achieve higher fidelity but demand controlled capture conditions and computationally intensive refinement processes. Motivated by the emergence of large reconstruction models for efficient static reconstruction, we propose LHM (Large Animatable Human Reconstruction Model) to infer high-fidelity avatars represented as 3D Gaussian splatting in a feed-forward pass. Our model leverages a multimodal transformer architecture to effectively encode the human body positional features and image features with attention mechanism, enabling detailed preservation of clothing geometry and texture. To further boost the face identity preservation and fine detail recovery, we propose a head feature pyramid encoding scheme to aggregate multi-scale features of the head regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LHM generates plausible animatable human in seconds without post-processing for face and hands, outperforming existing methods in both reconstruction accuracy and generalization ability.