MultiPhys: Multi-Person Physics-aware 3D Motion Estimation

We introduce MultiPhys, a method designed for recovering multi-person motion from monocular videos. Our focus lies in capturing coherent spatial placement between pairs of individuals across varying degrees of engagement. MultiPhys, being physically aware, exhibits robustness to jittering and occlusions, and effectively eliminates penetration issues between the two individuals. We devise a pipeline in which the motion estimated by a kinematic-based method is fed into a physics simulator in an autoregressive manner. We introduce distinct components that enable our model to harness the simulator's properties without compromising the accuracy of the kinematic estimates. This results in final motion estimates that are both kinematically coherent and physically compliant. Extensive evaluations on three challenging datasets characterized by substantial inter-person interaction show that our method significantly reduces errors associated with penetration and foot skating, while performing competitively with the state-of-the-art on motion accuracy and smoothness. Results and code can be found on our project page (http://www.iri.upc.edu/people/nugrinovic/multiphys/).

Reconstructing Hand-Held Objects in 3D

Objects manipulated by the hand (i.e., manipulanda) are particularly challenging to reconstruct from in-the-wild RGB images or videos. Not only does the hand occlude much of the object, but also the object is often only visible in a small number of image pixels. At the same time, two strong anchors emerge in this setting: (1) estimated 3D hands help disambiguate the location and scale of the object, and (2) the set of manipulanda is small relative to all possible objects. With these insights in mind, we present a scalable paradigm for handheld object reconstruction that builds on recent breakthroughs in large language/vision models and 3D object datasets. Our model, MCC-Hand-Object (MCC-HO), jointly reconstructs hand and object geometry given a single RGB image and inferred 3D hand as inputs. Subsequently, we use GPT-4(V) to retrieve a 3D object model that matches the object in the image and rigidly align the model to the network-inferred geometry; we call this alignment Retrieval-Augmented Reconstruction (RAR). Experiments demonstrate that MCC-HO achieves state-of-the-art performance on lab and Internet datasets, and we show how RAR can be used to automatically obtain 3D labels for in-the-wild images of hand-object interactions.

InstantSplat: Unbounded Sparse-view Pose-free Gaussian Splatting in 40 Seconds

While novel view synthesis (NVS) has made substantial progress in 3D computer vision, it typically requires an initial estimation of camera intrinsics and extrinsics from dense viewpoints. This pre-processing is usually conducted via a Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipeline, a procedure that can be slow and unreliable, particularly in sparse-view scenarios with insufficient matched features for accurate reconstruction. In this work, we integrate the strengths of point-based representations (e.g., 3D Gaussian Splatting, 3D-GS) with end-to-end dense stereo models (DUSt3R) to tackle the complex yet unresolved issues in NVS under unconstrained settings, which encompasses pose-free and sparse view challenges. Our framework, InstantSplat, unifies dense stereo priors with 3D-GS to build 3D Gaussians of large-scale scenes from sparseview & pose-free images in less than 1 minute. Specifically, InstantSplat comprises a Coarse Geometric Initialization (CGI) module that swiftly establishes a preliminary scene structure and camera parameters across all training views, utilizing globally-aligned 3D point maps derived from a pre-trained dense stereo pipeline. This is followed by the Fast 3D-Gaussian Optimization (F-3DGO) module, which jointly optimizes the 3D Gaussian attributes and the initialized poses with pose regularization. Experiments conducted on the large-scale outdoor Tanks & Temples datasets demonstrate that InstantSplat significantly improves SSIM (by 32%) while concurrently reducing Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) by 80%. These establish InstantSplat as a viable solution for scenarios involving posefree and sparse-view conditions. Project page: instantsplat.github.io.

Reconstructing Hands in 3D with Transformers

We present an approach that can reconstruct hands in 3D from monocular input. Our approach for Hand Mesh Recovery, HaMeR, follows a fully transformer-based architecture and can analyze hands with significantly increased accuracy and robustness compared to previous work. The key to HaMeR's success lies in scaling up both the data used for training and the capacity of the deep network for hand reconstruction. For training data, we combine multiple datasets that contain 2D or 3D hand annotations. For the deep model, we use a large scale Vision Transformer architecture. Our final model consistently outperforms the previous baselines on popular 3D hand pose benchmarks. To further evaluate the effect of our design in non-controlled settings, we annotate existing in-the-wild datasets with 2D hand keypoint annotations. On this newly collected dataset of annotations, HInt, we demonstrate significant improvements over existing baselines. We make our code, data and models available on the project website: https://geopavlakos.github.io/hamer/.

GART: Gaussian Articulated Template Models

We introduce Gaussian Articulated Template Model GART, an explicit, efficient, and expressive representation for non-rigid articulated subject capturing and rendering from monocular videos. GART utilizes a mixture of moving 3D Gaussians to explicitly approximate a deformable subject's geometry and appearance. It takes advantage of a categorical template model prior (SMPL, SMAL, etc.) with learnable forward skinning while further generalizing to more complex non-rigid deformations with novel latent bones. GART can be reconstructed via differentiable rendering from monocular videos in seconds or minutes and rendered in novel poses faster than 150fps.

Generative Proxemics: A Prior for 3D Social Interaction from Images

Social interaction is a fundamental aspect of human behavior and communication. The way individuals position themselves in relation to others, also known as proxemics, conveys social cues and affects the dynamics of social interaction. We present a novel approach that learns a 3D proxemics prior of two people in close social interaction. Since collecting a large 3D dataset of interacting people is a challenge, we rely on 2D image collections where social interactions are abundant. We achieve this by reconstructing pseudo-ground truth 3D meshes of interacting people from images with an optimization approach using existing ground-truth contact maps. We then model the proxemics using a novel denoising diffusion model called BUDDI that learns the joint distribution of two people in close social interaction directly in the SMPL-X parameter space. Sampling from our generative proxemics model produces realistic 3D human interactions, which we validate through a user study. Additionally, we introduce a new optimization method that uses the diffusion prior to reconstruct two people in close proximity from a single image without any contact annotation. Our approach recovers more accurate and plausible 3D social interactions from noisy initial estimates and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. See our project site for code, data, and model: muelea.github.io/buddi.

Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers

We present an approach to reconstruct humans and track them over time. At the core of our approach, we propose a fully "transformerized" version of a network for human mesh recovery. This network, HMR 2.0, advances the state of the art and shows the capability to analyze unusual poses that have in the past been difficult to reconstruct from single images. To analyze video, we use 3D reconstructions from HMR 2.0 as input to a tracking system that operates in 3D. This enables us to deal with multiple people and maintain identities through occlusion events. Our complete approach, 4DHumans, achieves state-of-the-art results for tracking people from monocular video. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of HMR 2.0 on the downstream task of action recognition, achieving significant improvements over previous pose-based action recognition approaches. Our code and models are available on the project website: https://shubham-goel.github.io/4dhumans/.

Learning Articulated Shape with Keypoint Pseudo-labels from Web Images

This paper shows that it is possible to learn models for monocular 3D reconstruction of articulated objects (e.g., horses, cows, sheep), using as few as 50-150 images labeled with 2D keypoints. Our proposed approach involves training category-specific keypoint estimators, generating 2D keypoint pseudo-labels on unlabeled web images, and using both the labeled and self-labeled sets to train 3D reconstruction models. It is based on two key insights: (1) 2D keypoint estimation networks trained on as few as 50-150 images of a given object category generalize well and generate reliable pseudo-labels; (2) a data selection mechanism can automatically create a "curated" subset of the unlabeled web images that can be used for training -- we evaluate four data selection methods. Coupling these two insights enables us to train models that effectively utilize web images, resulting in improved 3D reconstruction performance for several articulated object categories beyond the fully-supervised baseline. Our approach can quickly bootstrap a model and requires only a few images labeled with 2D keypoints. This requirement can be easily satisfied for any new object category. To showcase the practicality of our approach for predicting the 3D shape of arbitrary object categories, we annotate 2D keypoints on giraffe and bear images from COCO -- the annotation process takes less than 1 minute per image.

On the Benefits of 3D Pose and Tracking for Human Action Recognition

In this work we study the benefits of using tracking and 3D poses for action recognition. To achieve this, we take the Lagrangian view on analysing actions over a trajectory of human motion rather than at a fixed point in space. Taking this stand allows us to use the tracklets of people to predict their actions. In this spirit, first we show the benefits of using 3D pose to infer actions, and study person-person interactions. Subsequently, we propose a Lagrangian Action Recognition model by fusing 3D pose and contextualized appearance over tracklets. To this end, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the AVA v2.2 dataset on both pose only settings and on standard benchmark settings. When reasoning about the action using only pose cues, our pose model achieves +10.0 mAP gain over the corresponding state-of-the-art while our fused model has a gain of +2.8 mAP over the best state-of-the-art model. Code and results are available at: https://brjathu.github.io/LART

Decoupling Human and Camera Motion from Videos in the Wild

We propose a method to reconstruct global human trajectories from videos in the wild. Our optimization method decouples the camera and human motion, which allows us to place people in the same world coordinate frame. Most existing methods do not model the camera motion; methods that rely on the background pixels to infer 3D human motion usually require a full scene reconstruction, which is often not possible for in-the-wild videos. However, even when existing SLAM systems cannot recover accurate scene reconstructions, the background pixel motion still provides enough signal to constrain the camera motion. We show that relative camera estimates along with data-driven human motion priors can resolve the scene scale ambiguity and recover global human trajectories. Our method robustly recovers the global 3D trajectories of people in challenging in-the-wild videos, such as PoseTrack. We quantify our improvement over existing methods on 3D human dataset Egobody. We further demonstrate that our recovered camera scale allows us to reason about motion of multiple people in a shared coordinate frame, which improves performance of downstream tracking in PoseTrack. Code and video results can be found at https://vye16.github.io/slahmr.