KASportsFormer: Kinematic Anatomy Enhanced Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation on Short Sports Scene Video

Recent transformer based approaches have demonstrated impressive performance in solving real-world 3D human pose estimation problems. Albeit these approaches achieve fruitful results on benchmark datasets, they tend to fall short of sports scenarios where human movements are more complicated than daily life actions, as being hindered by motion blur, occlusions, and domain shifts. Moreover, due to the fact that critical motions in a sports game often finish in moments of time (e.g., shooting), the ability to focus on momentary actions is becoming a crucial factor in sports analysis, where current methods appear to struggle with instantaneous scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we introduce KASportsFormer, a novel transformer based 3D pose estimation framework for sports that incorporates a kinematic anatomy-informed feature representation and integration module. In which the inherent kinematic motion information is extracted with the Bone Extractor (BoneExt) and Limb Fuser (LimbFus) modules and encoded in a multimodal manner. This improved the capability of comprehending sports poses in short videos. We evaluate our method through two representative sports scene datasets: SportsPose and WorldPose. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results with MPJPE errors of 58.0mm and 34.3mm, respectively. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/jw0r1n/KASportsFormer

PUMPS: Skeleton-Agnostic Point-based Universal Motion Pre-Training for Synthesis in Human Motion Tasks

Motion skeletons drive 3D character animation by transforming bone hierarchies, but differences in proportions or structure make motion data hard to transfer across skeletons, posing challenges for data-driven motion synthesis. Temporal Point Clouds (TPCs) offer an unstructured, cross-compatible motion representation. Though reversible with skeletons, TPCs mainly serve for compatibility, not for direct motion task learning. Doing so would require data synthesis capabilities for the TPC format, which presents unexplored challenges regarding its unique temporal consistency and point identifiability. Therefore, we propose PUMPS, the primordial autoencoder architecture for TPC data. PUMPS independently reduces frame-wise point clouds into sampleable feature vectors, from which a decoder extracts distinct temporal points using latent Gaussian noise vectors as sampling identifiers. We introduce linear assignment-based point pairing to optimise the TPC reconstruction process, and negate the use of expensive point-wise attention mechanisms in the architecture. Using these latent features, we pre-train a motion synthesis model capable of performing motion prediction, transition generation, and keyframe interpolation. For these pre-training tasks, PUMPS performs remarkably well even without native dataset supervision, matching state-of-the-art performance. When fine-tuned for motion denoising or estimation, PUMPS outperforms many respective methods without deviating from its generalist architecture.

Physics-based Human Pose Estimation from a Single Moving RGB Camera

Most monocular and physics-based human pose tracking methods, while achieving state-of-the-art results, suffer from artifacts when the scene does not have a strictly flat ground plane or when the camera is moving. Moreover, these methods are often evaluated on in-the-wild real world videos without ground-truth data or on synthetic datasets, which fail to model the real world light transport, camera motion, and pose-induced appearance and geometry changes. To tackle these two problems, we introduce MoviCam, the first non-synthetic dataset containing ground-truth camera trajectories of a dynamically moving monocular RGB camera, scene geometry, and 3D human motion with human-scene contact labels. Additionally, we propose PhysDynPose, a physics-based method that incorporates scene geometry and physical constraints for more accurate human motion tracking in case of camera motion and non-flat scenes. More precisely, we use a state-of-the-art kinematics estimator to obtain the human pose and a robust SLAM method to capture the dynamic camera trajectory, enabling the recovery of the human pose in the world frame. We then refine the kinematic pose estimate using our scene-aware physics optimizer. From our new benchmark, we found that even state-of-the-art methods struggle with this inherently challenging setting, i.e. a moving camera and non-planar environments, while our method robustly estimates both human and camera poses in world coordinates.

Systematic Comparison of Projection Methods for Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation on Fisheye Images

Fisheye cameras offer robots the ability to capture human movements across a wider field of view (FOV) than standard pinhole cameras, making them particularly useful for applications in human-robot interaction and automotive contexts. However, accurately detecting human poses in fisheye images is challenging due to the curved distortions inherent to fisheye optics. While various methods for undistorting fisheye images have been proposed, their effectiveness and limitations for poses that cover a wide FOV has not been systematically evaluated in the context of absolute human pose estimation from monocular fisheye images. To address this gap, we evaluate the impact of pinhole, equidistant and double sphere camera models, as well as cylindrical projection methods, on 3D human pose estimation accuracy. We find that in close-up scenarios, pinhole projection is inadequate, and the optimal projection method varies with the FOV covered by the human pose. The usage of advanced fisheye models like the double sphere model significantly enhances 3D human pose estimation accuracy. We propose a heuristic for selecting the appropriate projection model based on the detection bounding box to enhance prediction quality. Additionally, we introduce and evaluate on our novel dataset FISHnCHIPS, which features 3D human skeleton annotations in fisheye images, including images from unconventional angles, such as extreme close-ups, ground-mounted cameras, and wide-FOV poses, available at: https://www.vision.rwth-aachen.de/fishnchips

Reconstructing Close Human Interaction with Appearance and Proxemics Reasoning

Due to visual ambiguities and inter-person occlusions, existing human pose estimation methods cannot recover plausible close interactions from in-the-wild videos. Even state-of-the-art large foundation models~(\eg, SAM) cannot accurately distinguish human semantics in such challenging scenarios. In this work, we find that human appearance can provide a straightforward cue to address these obstacles. Based on this observation, we propose a dual-branch optimization framework to reconstruct accurate interactive motions with plausible body contacts constrained by human appearances, social proxemics, and physical laws. Specifically, we first train a diffusion model to learn the human proxemic behavior and pose prior knowledge. The trained network and two optimizable tensors are then incorporated into a dual-branch optimization framework to reconstruct human motions and appearances. Several constraints based on 3D Gaussians, 2D keypoints, and mesh penetrations are also designed to assist the optimization. With the proxemics prior and diverse constraints, our method is capable of estimating accurate interactions from in-the-wild videos captured in complex environments. We further build a dataset with pseudo ground-truth interaction annotations, which may promote future research on pose estimation and human behavior understanding. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches. The code and data are available at https://www.buzhenhuang.com/works/CloseApp.html.

2024 NASA SUITS Report: LLM-Driven Immersive Augmented Reality User Interface for Robotics and Space Exploration

As modern computing advances, new interaction paradigms have emerged, particularly in Augmented Reality (AR), which overlays virtual interfaces onto physical objects. This evolution poses challenges in machine perception, especially for tasks like 3D object pose estimation in complex, dynamic environments. Our project addresses critical issues in human-robot interaction within mobile AR, focusing on non-intrusive, spatially aware interfaces. We present URSA, an LLM-driven immersive AR system developed for NASA's 2023-2024 SUITS challenge, targeting future spaceflight needs such as the Artemis missions. URSA integrates three core technologies: a head-mounted AR device (e.g., HoloLens) for intuitive visual feedback, voice control powered by large language models for hands-free interaction, and robot tracking algorithms that enable accurate 3D localization in dynamic settings. To enhance precision, we leverage digital twin localization technologies, using datasets like DTTD-Mobile and specialized hardware such as the ZED2 camera for real-world tracking under noise and occlusion. Our system enables real-time robot control and monitoring via an AR interface, even in the absence of ground-truth sensors--vital for hazardous or remote operations. Key contributions include: (1) a non-intrusive AR interface with LLM-based voice input; (2) a ZED2-based dataset tailored for non-rigid robotic bodies; (3) a Local Mission Control Console (LMCC) for mission visualization; (4) a transformer-based 6DoF pose estimator (DTTDNet) optimized for depth fusion and real-time tracking; and (5) end-to-end integration for astronaut mission support. This work advances digital twin applications in robotics, offering scalable solutions for both aerospace and industrial domains.

PoseGRAF: Geometric-Reinforced Adaptive Fusion for Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation

Existing monocular 3D pose estimation methods primarily rely on joint positional features, while overlooking intrinsic directional and angular correlations within the skeleton. As a result, they often produce implausible poses under joint occlusions or rapid motion changes. To address these challenges, we propose the PoseGRAF framework. We first construct a dual graph convolutional structure that separately processes joint and bone graphs, effectively capturing their local dependencies. A Cross-Attention module is then introduced to model interdependencies between bone directions and joint features. Building upon this, a dynamic fusion module is designed to adaptively integrate both feature types by leveraging the relational dependencies between joints and bones. An improved Transformer encoder is further incorporated in a residual manner to generate the final output. Experimental results on the Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets show that our method exceeds state-of-the-art approaches. Additional evaluations on in-the-wild videos further validate its generalizability. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/iCityLab/PoseGRAF.

PF-LHM: 3D Animatable Avatar Reconstruction from Pose-free Articulated Human Images

Reconstructing an animatable 3D human from casually captured images of an articulated subject without camera or human pose information is a practical yet challenging task due to view misalignment, occlusions, and the absence of structural priors. While optimization-based methods can produce high-fidelity results from monocular or multi-view videos, they require accurate pose estimation and slow iterative optimization, limiting scalability in unconstrained scenarios. Recent feed-forward approaches enable efficient single-image reconstruction but struggle to effectively leverage multiple input images to reduce ambiguity and improve reconstruction accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose PF-LHM, a large human reconstruction model that generates high-quality 3D avatars in seconds from one or multiple casually captured pose-free images. Our approach introduces an efficient Encoder-Decoder Point-Image Transformer architecture, which fuses hierarchical geometric point features and multi-view image features through multimodal attention. The fused features are decoded to recover detailed geometry and appearance, represented using 3D Gaussian splats. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our method unifies single- and multi-image 3D human reconstruction, achieving high-fidelity and animatable 3D human avatars without requiring camera and human pose annotations. Code and models will be released to the public.

Spectral Compression Transformer with Line Pose Graph for Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation

Transformer-based 3D human pose estimation methods suffer from high computational costs due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention with respect to sequence length. Additionally, pose sequences often contain significant redundancy between frames. However, recent methods typically fail to improve model capacity while effectively eliminating sequence redundancy. In this work, we introduce the Spectral Compression Transformer (SCT) to reduce sequence length and accelerate computation. The SCT encoder treats hidden features between blocks as Temporal Feature Signals (TFS) and applies the Discrete Cosine Transform, a Fourier transform-based technique, to determine the spectral components to be retained. By filtering out certain high-frequency noise components, SCT compresses the sequence length and reduces redundancy. To further enrich the input sequence with prior structural information, we propose the Line Pose Graph (LPG) based on line graph theory. The LPG generates skeletal position information that complements the input 2D joint positions, thereby improving the model's performance. Finally, we design a dual-stream network architecture to effectively model spatial joint relationships and the compressed motion trajectory within the pose sequence. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (i.e., Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP) demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance with improved computational efficiency. For example, on the Human3.6M dataset, our method achieves an MPJPE of 37.7mm while maintaining a low computational cost. Furthermore, we perform ablation studies on each module to assess its effectiveness. The code and models will be released.

Hearing Hands: Generating Sounds from Physical Interactions in 3D Scenes

We study the problem of making 3D scene reconstructions interactive by asking the following question: can we predict the sounds of human hands physically interacting with a scene? First, we record a video of a human manipulating objects within a 3D scene using their hands. We then use these action-sound pairs to train a rectified flow model to map 3D hand trajectories to their corresponding audio. At test time, a user can query the model for other actions, parameterized as sequences of hand poses, to estimate their corresponding sounds. In our experiments, we find that our generated sounds accurately convey material properties and actions, and that they are often indistinguishable to human observers from real sounds. Project page: https://www.yimingdou.com/hearing_hands/