InstructHumans: Editing Animated 3D Human Textures with Instructions

We present InstructHumans, a novel framework for instruction-driven 3D human texture editing. Existing text-based editing methods use Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) to distill guidance from generative models. This work shows that naively using such scores is harmful to editing as they destroy consistency with the source avatar. Instead, we propose an alternate SDS for Editing (SDS-E) that selectively incorporates subterms of SDS across diffusion timesteps. We further enhance SDS-E with spatial smoothness regularization and gradient-based viewpoint sampling to achieve high-quality edits with sharp and high-fidelity detailing. InstructHumans significantly outperforms existing 3D editing methods, consistent with the initial avatar while faithful to the textual instructions. Project page: https://jyzhu.top/instruct-humans .

Benchmarks and Challenges in Pose Estimation for Egocentric Hand Interactions with Objects

We interact with the world with our hands and see it through our own (egocentric) perspective. A holistic 3D understanding of such interactions from egocentric views is important for tasks in robotics, AR/VR, action recognition and motion generation. Accurately reconstructing such interactions in 3D is challenging due to heavy occlusion, viewpoint bias, camera distortion, and motion blur from the head movement. To this end, we designed the HANDS23 challenge based on the AssemblyHands and ARCTIC datasets with carefully designed training and testing splits. Based on the results of the top submitted methods and more recent baselines on the leaderboards, we perform a thorough analysis on 3D hand(-object) reconstruction tasks. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of addressing distortion specific to egocentric cameras, adopting high-capacity transformers to learn complex hand-object interactions, and fusing predictions from different views. Our study further reveals challenging scenarios intractable with state-of-the-art methods, such as fast hand motion, object reconstruction from narrow egocentric views, and close contact between two hands and objects. Our efforts will enrich the community's knowledge foundation and facilitate future hand studies on egocentric hand-object interactions.

HiFiHR: Enhancing 3D Hand Reconstruction from a Single Image via High-Fidelity Texture

We present HiFiHR, a high-fidelity hand reconstruction approach that utilizes render-and-compare in the learning-based framework from a single image, capable of generating visually plausible and accurate 3D hand meshes while recovering realistic textures. Our method achieves superior texture reconstruction by employing a parametric hand model with predefined texture assets, and by establishing a texture reconstruction consistency between the rendered and input images during training. Moreover, based on pretraining the network on an annotated dataset, we apply varying degrees of supervision using our pipeline, i.e., self-supervision, weak supervision, and full supervision, and discuss the various levels of contributions of the learned high-fidelity textures in enhancing hand pose and shape estimation. Experimental results on public benchmarks including FreiHAND and HO-3D demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art hand reconstruction methods in texture reconstruction quality while maintaining comparable accuracy in pose and shape estimation. Our code is available at https://github.com/viridityzhu/HiFiHR.

Overcoming the Trade-off Between Accuracy and Plausibility in 3D Hand Shape Reconstruction

Direct mesh fitting for 3D hand shape reconstruction is highly accurate. However, the reconstructed meshes are prone to artifacts and do not appear as plausible hand shapes. Conversely, parametric models like MANO ensure plausible hand shapes but are not as accurate as the non-parametric methods. In this work, we introduce a novel weakly-supervised hand shape estimation framework that integrates non-parametric mesh fitting with MANO model in an end-to-end fashion. Our joint model overcomes the tradeoff in accuracy and plausibility to yield well-aligned and high-quality 3D meshes, especially in challenging two-hand and hand-object interaction scenarios.

Bias-Compensated Integral Regression for Human Pose Estimation

In human and hand pose estimation, heatmaps are a crucial intermediate representation for a body or hand keypoint. Two popular methods to decode the heatmap into a final joint coordinate are via an argmax, as done in heatmap detection, or via softmax and expectation, as done in integral regression. Integral regression is learnable end-to-end, but has lower accuracy than detection. This paper uncovers an induced bias from integral regression that results from combining the softmax and the expectation operation. This bias often forces the network to learn degenerately localized heatmaps, obscuring the keypoint's true underlying distribution and leads to lower accuracies. Training-wise, by investigating the gradients of integral regression, we show that the implicit guidance of integral regression to update the heatmap makes it slower to converge than detection. To counter the above two limitations, we propose Bias Compensated Integral Regression (BCIR), an integral regression-based framework that compensates for the bias. BCIR also incorporates a Gaussian prior loss to speed up training and improve prediction accuracy. Experimental results on both the human body and hand benchmarks show that BCIR is faster to train and more accurate than the original integral regression, making it competitive with state-of-the-art detection methods.

Improving Deep Regression with Ordinal Entropy

In computer vision, it is often observed that formulating regression problems as a classification task often yields better performance. We investigate this curious phenomenon and provide a derivation to show that classification, with the cross-entropy loss, outperforms regression with a mean squared error loss in its ability to learn high-entropy feature representations. Based on the analysis, we propose an ordinal entropy loss to encourage higher-entropy feature spaces while maintaining ordinal relationships to improve the performance of regression tasks. Experiments on synthetic and real-world regression tasks demonstrate the importance and benefits of increasing entropy for regression.

UV-Based 3D Hand-Object Reconstruction with Grasp Optimization

We propose a novel framework for 3D hand shape reconstruction and hand-object grasp optimization from a single RGB image. The representation of hand-object contact regions is critical for accurate reconstructions. Instead of approximating the contact regions with sparse points, as in previous works, we propose a dense representation in the form of a UV coordinate map. Furthermore, we introduce inference-time optimization to fine-tune the grasp and improve interactions between the hand and the object. Our pipeline increases hand shape reconstruction accuracy and produces a vibrant hand texture. Experiments on datasets such as Ho3D, FreiHAND, and DexYCB reveal that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Confidence Dimension for Deep Learning based on Hoeffding Inequality and Relative Evaluation

Research on the generalization ability of deep neural networks (DNNs) has recently attracted a great deal of attention. However, due to their complex architectures and large numbers of parameters, measuring the generalization ability of specific DNN models remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose to use multiple factors to measure and rank the relative generalization of DNNs based on a new concept of confidence dimension (CD). Furthermore, we provide a feasible framework in our CD to theoretically calculate the upper bound of generalization based on the conventional Vapnik-Chervonenk dimension (VC-dimension) and Hoeffding's inequality. Experimental results on image classification and object detection demonstrate that our CD can reflect the relative generalization ability for different DNNs. In addition to full-precision DNNs, we also analyze the generalization ability of binary neural networks (BNNs), whose generalization ability remains an unsolved problem. Our CD yields a consistent and reliable measure and ranking for both full-precision DNNs and BNNs on all the tasks.

Local and Global Point Cloud Reconstruction for 3D Hand Pose Estimation

This paper addresses the 3D point cloud reconstruction and 3D pose estimation of the human hand from a single RGB image. To that end, we present a novel pipeline for local and global point cloud reconstruction using a 3D hand template while learning a latent representation for pose estimation. To demonstrate our method, we introduce a new multi-view hand posture dataset to obtain complete 3D point clouds of the hand in the real world. Experiments on our newly proposed dataset and four public benchmarks demonstrate the model's strengths. Our method outperforms competitors in 3D pose estimation while reconstructing realistic-looking complete 3D hand point clouds.

Video Super Resolution Based on Deep Learning: A comprehensive survey

In recent years, deep learning has made great progress in the fields of image recognition, video analysis, natural language processing and speech recognition, including video super-resolution tasks. In this survey, we comprehensively investigate 28 state-of-the-art video super-resolution methods based on deep learning. It is well known that the leverage of information within video frames is important for video super-resolution. Hence we propose a taxonomy and classify the methods into six sub-categories according to the ways of utilizing inter-frame information. Moreover, the architectures and implementation details (including input and output, loss function and learning rate) of all the methods are depicted in details. Finally, we summarize and compare their performance on some benchmark datasets under different magnification factors. We also discuss some challenges, which need to be further addressed by researchers in the community of video super-resolution. Therefore, this work is expected to make a contribution to the future development of research in video super-resolution, and alleviate understandability and transferability of existing and future techniques into practice.