Deep Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation via Cascaded Dimension-Lifting

The 3D pose estimation from a single image is a challenging problem due to depth ambiguity. One type of the previous methods lifts 2D joints, obtained by resorting to external 2D pose detectors, to the 3D space. However, this type of approaches discards the contextual information of images which are strong cues for 3D pose estimation. Meanwhile, some other methods predict the joints directly from monocular images but adopt a 2.5D output representation $P^{2.5D} = (u,v,z^{r}) $ where both $u$ and $v$ are in the image space but $z^{r}$ in root-relative 3D space. Thus, the ground-truth information (e.g., the depth of root joint from the camera) is normally utilized to transform the 2.5D output to the 3D space, which limits the applicability in practice. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end framework that not only exploits the contextual information but also produces the output directly in the 3D space via cascaded dimension-lifting. Specifically, we decompose the task of lifting pose from 2D image space to 3D spatial space into several sequential sub-tasks, 1) kinematic skeletons \& individual joints estimation in 2D space, 2) root-relative depth estimation, and 3) lifting to the 3D space, each of which employs direct supervisions and contextual image features to guide the learning process. Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely used 3D human pose datasets (Human3.6M, MuPoTS-3D).

EMLight: Lighting Estimation via Spherical Distribution Approximation

Illumination estimation from a single image is critical in 3D rendering and it has been investigated extensively in the computer vision and computer graphic research community. On the other hand, existing works estimate illumination by either regressing light parameters or generating illumination maps that are often hard to optimize or tend to produce inaccurate predictions. We propose Earth Mover Light (EMLight), an illumination estimation framework that leverages a regression network and a neural projector for accurate illumination estimation. We decompose the illumination map into spherical light distribution, light intensity and the ambient term, and define the illumination estimation as a parameter regression task for the three illumination components. Motivated by the Earth Mover distance, we design a novel spherical mover's loss that guides to regress light distribution parameters accurately by taking advantage of the subtleties of spherical distribution. Under the guidance of the predicted spherical distribution, light intensity and ambient term, the neural projector synthesizes panoramic illumination maps with realistic light frequency. Extensive experiments show that EMLight achieves accurate illumination estimation and the generated relighting in 3D object embedding exhibits superior plausibility and fidelity as compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Time-Efficient Mars Exploration of Simultaneous Coverage and Charging with Multiple Drones

This paper presents a time-efficient scheme for Mars exploration by the cooperation of multiple drones and a rover. To maximize effective coverage of the Mars surface in the long run, a comprehensive framework has been developed with joint consideration for limited energy, sensor model, communication range and safety radius, which we call TIME-SC2 (TIme-efficient Mars Exploration of Simultaneous Coverage and Charging). First, we propose a multi-drone coverage control algorithm by leveraging emerging deep reinforcement learning and design a novel information map to represent dynamic system states. Second, we propose a near-optimal charging scheduling algorithm to navigate each drone to an individual charging slot, and we have proven that there always exists feasible solutions. The attractiveness of this framework not only resides on its ability to maximize exploration efficiency, but also on its high autonomy that has greatly reduced the non-exploring time. Extensive simulations have been conducted to demonstrate the remarkable performance of TIME-SC2 in terms of time-efficiency, adaptivity and flexibility.