Human Part-wise 3D Motion Context Learning for Sign Language Recognition

In this paper, we propose P3D, the human part-wise motion context learning framework for sign language recognition. Our main contributions lie in two dimensions: learning the part-wise motion context and employing the pose ensemble to utilize 2D and 3D pose jointly. First, our empirical observation implies that part-wise context encoding benefits the performance of sign language recognition. While previous methods of sign language recognition learned motion context from the sequence of the entire pose, we argue that such methods cannot exploit part-specific motion context. In order to utilize part-wise motion context, we propose the alternating combination of a part-wise encoding Transformer (PET) and a whole-body encoding Transformer (WET). PET encodes the motion contexts from a part sequence, while WET merges them into a unified context. By learning part-wise motion context, our P3D achieves superior performance on WLASL compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. Second, our framework is the first to ensemble 2D and 3D poses for sign language recognition. Since the 3D pose holds rich motion context and depth information to distinguish the words, our P3D outperformed the previous state-of-the-art methods employing a pose ensemble.

Rethinking Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning in Pre-training for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation

Recently, a few self-supervised representation learning (SSL) methods have outperformed the ImageNet classification pre-training for vision tasks such as object detection. However, its effects on 3D human body pose and shape estimation (3DHPSE) are open to question, whose target is fixed to a unique class, the human, and has an inherent task gap with SSL. We empirically study and analyze the effects of SSL and further compare it with other pre-training alternatives for 3DHPSE. The alternatives are 2D annotation-based pre-training and synthetic data pre-training, which share the motivation of SSL that aims to reduce the labeling cost. They have been widely utilized as a source of weak-supervision or fine-tuning, but have not been remarked as a pre-training source. SSL methods underperform the conventional ImageNet classification pre-training on multiple 3DHPSE benchmarks by 7.7% on average. In contrast, despite a much less amount of pre-training data, the 2D annotation-based pre-training improves accuracy on all benchmarks and shows faster convergence during fine-tuning. Our observations challenge the naive application of the current SSL pre-training to 3DHPSE and relight the value of other data types in the pre-training aspect.

MultiAct: Long-Term 3D Human Motion Generation from Multiple Action Labels

We tackle the problem of generating long-term 3D human motion from multiple action labels. Two main previous approaches, such as action- and motion-conditioned methods, have limitations to solve this problem. The action-conditioned methods generate a sequence of motion from a single action. Hence, it cannot generate long-term motions composed of multiple actions and transitions between actions. Meanwhile, the motion-conditioned methods generate future motions from initial motion. The generated future motions only depend on the past, so they are not controllable by the user's desired actions. We present MultiAct, the first framework to generate long-term 3D human motion from multiple action labels. MultiAct takes account of both action and motion conditions with a unified recurrent generation system. It repetitively takes the previous motion and action label; then, it generates a smooth transition and the motion of the given action. As a result, MultiAct produces realistic long-term motion controlled by the given sequence of multiple action labels. The code will be released.