Towards Subcentimeter Accuracy Digital-Twin Tracking via An RGBD-based Transformer Model and A Comprehensive Mobile Dataset

The potential of digital twin technology, involving the creation of precise digital replicas of physical objects, to reshape AR experiences in 3D object tracking and localization scenarios is significant. However, enabling 3D object tracking with subcentimeter accuracy in dynamic mobile AR environments remains a formidable challenge. These scenarios often require a more robust pose estimator capable of handling the inherent sensor-level measurement noise. In this paper, recognizing the absence of comprehensive solutions in existing literature, we build upon our previous work, the Digital Twin Tracking Dataset (DTTD), to address these challenges in mobile AR settings. Specifically, we propose a transformer-based 6DoF pose estimator designed to withstand the challenges posed by noisy depth data. Simultaneously, we introduce a novel RGBD dataset captured using a cutting-edge mobile sensor, the iPhone 14 Pro, expanding the applicability of our approach to iPhone sensor data. Through extensive experimentation and in-depth analysis, we illustrate the effectiveness of our methods in the face of significant depth data errors, surpassing the performance of existing baselines. Code will be made publicly available.

Generating Animatable 3D Cartoon Faces from Single Portraits

With the booming of virtual reality (VR) technology, there is a growing need for customized 3D avatars. However, traditional methods for 3D avatar modeling are either time-consuming or fail to retain similarity to the person being modeled. We present a novel framework to generate animatable 3D cartoon faces from a single portrait image. We first transfer an input real-world portrait to a stylized cartoon image with a StyleGAN. Then we propose a two-stage reconstruction method to recover the 3D cartoon face with detailed texture, which first makes a coarse estimation based on template models, and then refines the model by non-rigid deformation under landmark supervision. Finally, we propose a semantic preserving face rigging method based on manually created templates and deformation transfer. Compared with prior arts, qualitative and quantitative results show that our method achieves better accuracy, aesthetics, and similarity criteria. Furthermore, we demonstrate the capability of real-time facial animation of our 3D model.

Digital Twin Tracking Dataset (DTTD): A New RGB+Depth 3D Dataset for Longer-Range Object Tracking Applications

Digital twin is a problem of augmenting real objects with their digital counterparts. It can underpin a wide range of applications in augmented reality (AR), autonomy, and UI/UX. A critical component in a good digital twin system is real-time, accurate 3D object tracking. Most existing works solve 3D object tracking through the lens of robotic grasping, employ older generations of depth sensors, and measure performance metrics that may not apply to other digital twin applications such as in AR. In this work, we create a novel RGB-D dataset, called Digital-Twin Tracking Dataset (DTTD), to enable further research of the problem and extend potential solutions towards longer ranges and mm localization accuracy. To reduce point cloud noise from the input source, we select the latest Microsoft Azure Kinect as the state-of-the-art time-of-flight (ToF) camera. In total, 103 scenes of 10 common off-the-shelf objects with rich textures are recorded, with each frame annotated with a per-pixel semantic segmentation and ground-truth object poses provided by a commercial motion capturing system. Through experiments, we demonstrate that DTTD can help researchers develop future object tracking methods and analyze new challenges. We provide the dataset, data generation, annotation, and model evaluation pipeline as open source code at: https://github.com/augcog/DTTDv1.

Object Pursuit: Building a Space of Objects via Discriminative Weight Generation

We propose a framework to continuously learn object-centric representations for visual learning and understanding. Existing object-centric representations either rely on supervisions that individualize objects in the scene, or perform unsupervised disentanglement that can hardly deal with complex scenes in the real world. To mitigate the annotation burden and relax the constraints on the statistical complexity of the data, our method leverages interactions to effectively sample diverse variations of an object and the corresponding training signals while learning the object-centric representations. Throughout learning, objects are streamed one by one in random order with unknown identities, and are associated with latent codes that can synthesize discriminative weights for each object through a convolutional hypernetwork. Moreover, re-identification of learned objects and forgetting prevention are employed to make the learning process efficient and robust. We perform an extensive study of the key features of the proposed framework and analyze the characteristics of the learned representations. Furthermore, we demonstrate the capability of the proposed framework in learning representations that can improve label efficiency in downstream tasks. Our code and trained models will be made publicly available.

Robust 3D Self-portraits in Seconds

In this paper, we propose an efficient method for robust 3D self-portraits using a single RGBD camera. Benefiting from the proposed PIFusion and lightweight bundle adjustment algorithm, our method can generate detailed 3D self-portraits in seconds and shows the ability to handle subjects wearing extremely loose clothes. To achieve highly efficient and robust reconstruction, we propose PIFusion, which combines learning-based 3D recovery with volumetric non-rigid fusion to generate accurate sparse partial scans of the subject. Moreover, a non-rigid volumetric deformation method is proposed to continuously refine the learned shape prior. Finally, a lightweight bundle adjustment algorithm is proposed to guarantee that all the partial scans can not only "loop" with each other but also remain consistent with the selected live key observations. The results and experiments show that the proposed method achieves more robust and efficient 3D self-portraits compared with state-of-the-art methods.