Closely Interactive Human Reconstruction with Proxemics and Physics-Guided Adaption

Existing multi-person human reconstruction approaches mainly focus on recovering accurate poses or avoiding penetration, but overlook the modeling of close interactions. In this work, we tackle the task of reconstructing closely interactive humans from a monocular video. The main challenge of this task comes from insufficient visual information caused by depth ambiguity and severe inter-person occlusion. In view of this, we propose to leverage knowledge from proxemic behavior and physics to compensate the lack of visual information. This is based on the observation that human interaction has specific patterns following the social proxemics. Specifically, we first design a latent representation based on Vector Quantised-Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) to model human interaction. A proxemics and physics guided diffusion model is then introduced to denoise the initial distribution. We design the diffusion model as dual branch with each branch representing one individual such that the interaction can be modeled via cross attention. With the learned priors of VQ-VAE and physical constraint as the additional information, our proposed approach is capable of estimating accurate poses that are also proxemics and physics plausible. Experimental results on Hi4D, 3DPW, and CHI3D demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/boycehbz/HumanInteraction}.

CrowdRec: 3D Crowd Reconstruction from Single Color Images

This is a technical report for the GigaCrowd challenge. Reconstructing 3D crowds from monocular images is a challenging problem due to mutual occlusions, server depth ambiguity, and complex spatial distribution. Since no large-scale 3D crowd dataset can be used to train a robust model, the current multi-person mesh recovery methods can hardly achieve satisfactory performance in crowded scenes. In this paper, we exploit the crowd features and propose a crowd-constrained optimization to improve the common single-person method on crowd images. To avoid scale variations, we first detect human bounding-boxes and 2D poses from the original images with off-the-shelf detectors. Then, we train a single-person mesh recovery network using existing in-the-wild image datasets. To promote a more reasonable spatial distribution, we further propose a crowd constraint to refine the single-person network parameters. With the optimization, we can obtain accurate body poses and shapes with reasonable absolute positions from a large-scale crowd image using a single-person backbone. The code will be publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/boycehbz/CrowdRec}.

Reconstructing Groups of People with Hypergraph Relational Reasoning

Due to the mutual occlusion, severe scale variation, and complex spatial distribution, the current multi-person mesh recovery methods cannot produce accurate absolute body poses and shapes in large-scale crowded scenes. To address the obstacles, we fully exploit crowd features for reconstructing groups of people from a monocular image. A novel hypergraph relational reasoning network is proposed to formulate the complex and high-order relation correlations among individuals and groups in the crowd. We first extract compact human features and location information from the original high-resolution image. By conducting the relational reasoning on the extracted individual features, the underlying crowd collectiveness and interaction relationship can provide additional group information for the reconstruction. Finally, the updated individual features and the localization information are used to regress human meshes in camera coordinates. To facilitate the network training, we further build pseudo ground-truth on two crowd datasets, which may also promote future research on pose estimation and human behavior understanding in crowded scenes. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms other baseline methods both in crowded and common scenarios. The code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/boycehbz/GroupRec.

Physics-Guided Human Motion Capture with Pose Probability Modeling

Incorporating physics in human motion capture to avoid artifacts like floating, foot sliding, and ground penetration is a promising direction. Existing solutions always adopt kinematic results as reference motions, and the physics is treated as a post-processing module. However, due to the depth ambiguity, monocular motion capture inevitably suffers from noises, and the noisy reference often leads to failure for physics-based tracking. To address the obstacles, our key-idea is to employ physics as denoising guidance in the reverse diffusion process to reconstruct physically plausible human motion from a modeled pose probability distribution. Specifically, we first train a latent gaussian model that encodes the uncertainty of 2D-to-3D lifting to facilitate reverse diffusion. Then, a physics module is constructed to track the motion sampled from the distribution. The discrepancies between the tracked motion and image observation are used to provide explicit guidance for the reverse diffusion model to refine the motion. With several iterations, the physics-based tracking and kinematic denoising promote each other to generate a physically plausible human motion. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous physics-based methods in both joint accuracy and success rate. More information can be found at \url{https://github.com/Me-Ditto/Physics-Guided-Mocap}.

Synthesizing Physically Plausible Human Motions in 3D Scenes

Synthesizing physically plausible human motions in 3D scenes is a challenging problem. Kinematics-based methods cannot avoid inherent artifacts (e.g., penetration and foot skating) due to the lack of physical constraints. Meanwhile, existing physics-based methods cannot generalize to multi-object scenarios since the policy trained with reinforcement learning has limited modeling capacity. In this work, we present a framework that enables physically simulated characters to perform long-term interaction tasks in diverse, cluttered, and unseen scenes. The key idea is to decompose human-scene interactions into two fundamental processes, Interacting and Navigating, which motivates us to construct two reusable Controller, i.e., InterCon and NavCon. Specifically, InterCon contains two complementary policies that enable characters to enter and leave the interacting state (e.g., sitting on a chair and getting up). To generate interaction with objects at different places, we further design NavCon, a trajectory following policy, to keep characters' locomotion in the free space of 3D scenes. Benefiting from the divide and conquer strategy, we can train the policies in simple environments and generalize to complex multi-object scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework can synthesize physically plausible long-term human motions in complex 3D scenes. Code will be publicly released at https://github.com/liangpan99/InterScene.

Occluded Human Body Capture with Self-Supervised Spatial-Temporal Motion Prior

Although significant progress has been achieved on monocular maker-less human motion capture in recent years, it is still hard for state-of-the-art methods to obtain satisfactory results in occlusion scenarios. There are two main reasons: the one is that the occluded motion capture is inherently ambiguous as various 3D poses can map to the same 2D observations, which always results in an unreliable estimation. The other is that no sufficient occluded human data can be used for training a robust model. To address the obstacles, our key-idea is to employ non-occluded human data to learn a joint-level spatial-temporal motion prior for occluded human with a self-supervised strategy. To further reduce the gap between synthetic and real occlusion data, we build the first 3D occluded motion dataset~(OcMotion), which can be used for both training and testing. We encode the motions in 2D maps and synthesize occlusions on non-occluded data for the self-supervised training. A spatial-temporal layer is then designed to learn joint-level correlations. The learned prior reduces the ambiguities of occlusions and is robust to diverse occlusion types, which is then adopted to assist the occluded human motion capture. Experimental results show that our method can generate accurate and coherent human motions from occluded videos with good generalization ability and runtime efficiency. The dataset and code are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/boycehbz/CHOMP}.

Neural MoCon: Neural Motion Control for Physically Plausible Human Motion Capture

Due to the visual ambiguity, purely kinematic formulations on monocular human motion capture are often physically incorrect, biomechanically implausible, and can not reconstruct accurate interactions. In this work, we focus on exploiting the high-precision and non-differentiable physics simulator to incorporate dynamical constraints in motion capture. Our key-idea is to use real physical supervisions to train a target pose distribution prior for sampling-based motion control to capture physically plausible human motion. To obtain accurate reference motion with terrain interactions for the sampling, we first introduce an interaction constraint based on SDF (Signed Distance Field) to enforce appropriate ground contact modeling. We then design a novel two-branch decoder to avoid stochastic error from pseudo ground-truth and train a distribution prior with the non-differentiable physics simulator. Finally, we regress the sampling distribution from the current state of the physical character with the trained prior and sample satisfied target poses to track the estimated reference motion. Qualitative and quantitative results show that we can obtain physically plausible human motion with complex terrain interactions, human shape variations, and diverse behaviors. More information can be found at~\url{https://www.yangangwang.com/papers/HBZ-NM-2022-03.html}

Dynamic Multi-Person Mesh Recovery From Uncalibrated Multi-View Cameras

Dynamic multi-person mesh recovery has been a hot topic in 3D vision recently. However, few works focus on the multi-person motion capture from uncalibrated cameras, which mainly faces two challenges: the one is that inter-person interactions and occlusions introduce inherent ambiguities for both camera calibration and motion capture; The other is that a lack of dense correspondences can be used to constrain sparse camera geometries in a dynamic multi-person scene. Our key idea is incorporating motion prior knowledge into simultaneous optimization of extrinsic camera parameters and human meshes from noisy human semantics. First, we introduce a physics-geometry consistency to reduce the low and high frequency noises of the detected human semantics. Then a novel latent motion prior is proposed to simultaneously optimize extrinsic camera parameters and coherent human motions from slightly noisy inputs. Experimental results show that accurate camera parameters and human motions can be obtained through one-stage optimization. The codes will be publicly available at~\url{https://www.yangangwang.com}.