Explicit Clothing Modeling for an Animatable Full-Body Avatar

Recent work has shown great progress in building photorealistic animatable full-body codec avatars, but these avatars still face difficulties in generating high-fidelity animation of clothing. To address the difficulties, we propose a method to build an animatable clothed body avatar with an explicit representation of the clothing on the upper body from multi-view captured videos. We use a two-layer mesh representation to separately register the 3D scans with templates. In order to improve the photometric correspondence across different frames, texture alignment is then performed through inverse rendering of the clothing geometry and texture predicted by a variational autoencoder. We then train a new two-layer codec avatar with separate modeling of the upper clothing and the inner body layer. To learn the interaction between the body dynamics and clothing states, we use a temporal convolution network to predict the clothing latent code based on a sequence of input skeletal poses. We show photorealistic animation output for three different actors, and demonstrate the advantage of our clothed-body avatars over single-layer avatars in the previous work. We also show the benefit of an explicit clothing model which allows the clothing texture to be edited in the animation output.

DeepMesh: Differentiable Iso-Surface Extraction

Geometric Deep Learning has recently made striking progress with the advent of continuous Deep Implicit Fields. They allow for detailed modeling of watertight surfaces of arbitrary topology while not relying on a 3D Euclidean grid, resulting in a learnable parameterization that is unlimited in resolution. Unfortunately, these methods are often unsuitable for applications that require an explicit mesh-based surface representation because converting an implicit field to such a representation relies on the Marching Cubes algorithm, which cannot be differentiated with respect to the underlying implicit field. In this work, we remove this limitation and introduce a differentiable way to produce explicit surface mesh representations from Deep Implicit Fields. Our key insight is that by reasoning on how implicit field perturbations impact local surface geometry, one can ultimately differentiate the 3D location of surface samples with respect to the underlying deep implicit field. We exploit this to define DeepMesh -- end-to-end differentiable mesh representation that can vary its topology. We use two different applications to validate our theoretical insight: Single view 3D Reconstruction via Differentiable Rendering and Physically-Driven Shape Optimization. In both cases our end-to-end differentiable parameterization gives us an edge over state-of-the-art algorithms.

Driving-Signal Aware Full-Body Avatars

We present a learning-based method for building driving-signal aware full-body avatars. Our model is a conditional variational autoencoder that can be animated with incomplete driving signals, such as human pose and facial keypoints, and produces a high-quality representation of human geometry and view-dependent appearance. The core intuition behind our method is that better drivability and generalization can be achieved by disentangling the driving signals and remaining generative factors, which are not available during animation. To this end, we explicitly account for information deficiency in the driving signal by introducing a latent space that exclusively captures the remaining information, thus enabling the imputation of the missing factors required during full-body animation, while remaining faithful to the driving signal. We also propose a learnable localized compression for the driving signal which promotes better generalization, and helps minimize the influence of global chance-correlations often found in real datasets. For a given driving signal, the resulting variational model produces a compact space of uncertainty for missing factors that allows for an imputation strategy best suited to a particular application. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on the challenging problem of full-body animation for virtual telepresence with driving signals acquired from minimal sensors placed in the environment and mounted on a VR-headset.

Learning Compositional Radiance Fields of Dynamic Human Heads

Photorealistic rendering of dynamic humans is an important ability for telepresence systems, virtual shopping, synthetic data generation, and more. Recently, neural rendering methods, which combine techniques from computer graphics and machine learning, have created high-fidelity models of humans and objects. Some of these methods do not produce results with high-enough fidelity for driveable human models (Neural Volumes) whereas others have extremely long rendering times (NeRF). We propose a novel compositional 3D representation that combines the best of previous methods to produce both higher-resolution and faster results. Our representation bridges the gap between discrete and continuous volumetric representations by combining a coarse 3D-structure-aware grid of animation codes with a continuous learned scene function that maps every position and its corresponding local animation code to its view-dependent emitted radiance and local volume density. Differentiable volume rendering is employed to compute photo-realistic novel views of the human head and upper body as well as to train our novel representation end-to-end using only 2D supervision. In addition, we show that the learned dynamic radiance field can be used to synthesize novel unseen expressions based on a global animation code. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel views of dynamic human heads and the upper body.

Masksembles for Uncertainty Estimation

Deep neural networks have amply demonstrated their prowess but estimating the reliability of their predictions remains challenging. Deep Ensembles are widely considered as being one of the best methods for generating uncertainty estimates but are very expensive to train and evaluate. MC-Dropout is another popular alternative, which is less expensive, but also less reliable. Our central intuition is that there is a continuous spectrum of ensemble-like models of which MC-Dropout and Deep Ensembles are extreme examples. The first uses an effectively infinite number of highly correlated models while the second relies on a finite number of independent models. To combine the benefits of both, we introduce Masksembles. Instead of randomly dropping parts of the network as in MC-dropout, Masksemble relies on a fixed number of binary masks, which are parameterized in a way that allows to change correlations between individual models. Namely, by controlling the overlap between the masks and their density one can choose the optimal configuration for the task at hand. This leads to a simple and easy to implement method with performance on par with Ensembles at a fraction of the cost. We experimentally validate Masksembles on two widely used datasets, CIFAR10 and ImageNet.

MeshSDF: Differentiable Iso-Surface Extraction

Geometric Deep Learning has recently made striking progress with the advent of continuous Deep Implicit Fields. They allow for detailed modeling of watertight surfaces of arbitrary topology while not relying on a 3D Euclidean grid, resulting in a learnable parameterization that is not limited in resolution. Unfortunately, these methods are often not suitable for applications that require an explicit mesh-based surface representation because converting an implicit field to such a representation relies on the Marching Cubes algorithm, which cannot be differentiated with respect to the underlying implicit field. In this work, we remove this limitation and introduce a differentiable way to produce explicit surface mesh representations from Deep Signed Distance Functions. Our key insight is that by reasoning on how implicit field perturbations impact local surface geometry, one can ultimately differentiate the 3D location of surface samples with respect to the underlying deep implicit field. We exploit this to define MeshSDF, an end-to-end differentiable mesh representation which can vary its topology. We use two different applications to validate our theoretical insight: Single-View Reconstruction via Differentiable Rendering and Physically-Driven Shape Optimization. In both cases our differentiable parameterization gives us an edge over state-of-the-art algorithms.

Social Scene Understanding: End-to-End Multi-Person Action Localization and Collective Activity Recognition

We present a unified framework for understanding human social behaviors in raw image sequences. Our model jointly detects multiple individuals, infers their social actions, and estimates the collective actions with a single feed-forward pass through a neural network. We propose a single architecture that does not rely on external detection algorithms but rather is trained end-to-end to generate dense proposal maps that are refined via a novel inference scheme. The temporal consistency is handled via a person-level matching Recurrent Neural Network. The complete model takes as input a sequence of frames and outputs detections along with the estimates of individual actions and collective activities. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our algorithm on multiple publicly available benchmarks.

Principled Parallel Mean-Field Inference for Discrete Random Fields

Mean-field variational inference is one of the most popular approaches to inference in discrete random fields. Standard mean-field optimization is based on coordinate descent and in many situations can be impractical. Thus, in practice, various parallel techniques are used, which either rely on ad-hoc smoothing with heuristically set parameters, or put strong constraints on the type of models. In this paper, we propose a novel proximal gradient-based approach to optimizing the variational objective. It is naturally parallelizable and easy to implement. We prove its convergence, and then demonstrate that, in practice, it yields faster convergence and often finds better optima than more traditional mean-field optimization techniques. Moreover, our method is less sensitive to the choice of parameters.