Neural Motion Blending Across Arbitrary Character Topologies

Motion blending in character animation enables the synthesis of new motions by interpolating between existing examples. Current methods are typically restricted to fixed skeleton topologies, requiring identical or near-identical skeletal structures across characters. We present a novel framework for motion blending across heterogeneous skeletons. The proposed architecture combines a semantic encoder, which extracts per-frame latent representations of the motion state, with a diffusion-based decoder, which reconstructs character-specific motion conditioned on this latent code. At inference, blended motions are obtained by interpolating the latent representations of two input motions. We train and evaluate the method on the Truebones Zoo dataset using motions defined on both same and distinct skeleton topologies, demonstrating the ability to achieve smooth and plausible blending in a variety of scenarios.

VolHuMe: a High-Resolution Large Scale Dataset of Volumetric Human Meshes

We introduce VolHuMe, a dataset of high-quality 4D human scans captured with a state-of-the-art volumetric studio using 64 RGB and 32 depth cameras. VolHuMe contains individual captures of 104 subjects and provides extensive ground truth, including SMPL-X, high-resolution meshes, multi-view RGB/depth images, rigged meshes, point clouds, garment segmentation, and detailed hand and facial geometry. Unlike prior datasets that primarily rely on full-body imagery, VolHuMe uses a close-range, high-resolution capture setup that preserves fine-grained body-part details, improving geometric fidelity and texture resolution. We benchmark VolHuMe on state-of-the-art methods across 3D and 4D human reconstruction tasks, showcasing the dataset's quality and exposing the limitations of current evaluation testbeds.

EPOCH: Jointly Estimating the 3D Pose of Cameras and Humans

Monocular Human Pose Estimation (HPE) aims at determining the 3D positions of human joints from a single 2D image captured by a camera. However, a single 2D point in the image may correspond to multiple points in 3D space. Typically, the uniqueness of the 2D-3D relationship is approximated using an orthographic or weak-perspective camera model. In this study, instead of relying on approximations, we advocate for utilizing the full perspective camera model. This involves estimating camera parameters and establishing a precise, unambiguous 2D-3D relationship. To do so, we introduce the EPOCH framework, comprising two main components: the pose lifter network (LiftNet) and the pose regressor network (RegNet). LiftNet utilizes the full perspective camera model to precisely estimate the 3D pose in an unsupervised manner. It takes a 2D pose and camera parameters as inputs and produces the corresponding 3D pose estimation. These inputs are obtained from RegNet, which starts from a single image and provides estimates for the 2D pose and camera parameters. RegNet utilizes only 2D pose data as weak supervision. Internally, RegNet predicts a 3D pose, which is then projected to 2D using the estimated camera parameters. This process enables RegNet to establish the unambiguous 2D-3D relationship. Our experiments show that modeling the lifting as an unsupervised task with a camera in-the-loop results in better generalization to unseen data. We obtain state-of-the-art results for the 3D HPE on the Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets. Our code is available at: [Github link upon acceptance, see supplementary materials].