Dynamic Bayesian networks such as Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are successfully used as probabilistic models for human motion. The use of hidden variables makes them expressive models, but inference is only approximate and requires procedures such as particle filters or Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. In this work we propose to instead use simple Markov models that only model observed quantities. We retain a highly expressive dynamic model by using interactions that are nonlinear and non-parametric. A presentation of our approach in terms of latent variables shows logarithmic growth for the computation of exact loglikelihoods in the number of latent states. We validate our model on human motion capture data and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on action recognition and motion completion tasks.

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Fig. 1. Renderings of objects captured and modeled by our system. The input to our method consists of synchronized and calibrated multi-view video. We build a dynamic, volumetric representation of the scene by training an encoder-decoder network end-to-end using a differentiable ray marching algorithm.Modeling and rendering of dynamic scenes is challenging, as natural scenes often contain complex phenomena such as thin structures, evolving topology, translucency, scattering, occlusion, and biological motion. Mesh-based reconstruction and tracking often fail in these cases, and other approaches (e.g., light field video) typically rely on constrained viewing conditions, which limit interactivity. We circumvent these difficulties by presenting a learningbased approach to representing dynamic objects inspired by the integral projection model used in tomographic imaging. The approach is supervised directly from 2D images in a multi-view capture setting and does not require explicit reconstruction or tracking of the object. Our method has two primary components: an encoder-decoder network that transforms input images into a 3D volume representation, and a differentiable ray-marching operation that enables end-to-end training. By virtue of its 3D representation, our construction extrapolates better to novel viewpoints compared to screen-space rendering techniques. The encoder-decoder architecture learns a latent representation of a dynamic scene that enables us to produce novel content sequences not seen during training. To overcome memory limitations of voxel-based representations, we learn a dynamic irregular grid structure implemented with a warp field during ray-marching. This structure greatly improves the apparent resolution and reduces grid-like artifacts and jagged motion. Finally, we demonstrate how to incorporate surface-based representations into our volumetric-learning framework for applications

Videos express highly structured spatio-temporal patterns of visual data. A video can be thought of as being governed by two factors: (i) temporally invariant (e.g., person identity), or slowly varying (e.g., activity), attributeinduced appearance, encoding the persistent content of each frame, and (ii) an inter-frame motion or scene dynamics (e.g., encoding evolution of the person executing the action). Based on this intuition, we propose a generative framework for video generation and future prediction. The proposed framework generates a video (short clip) by decoding samples sequentially drawn from a latent space distribution into full video frames. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are used as a means of encoding/decoding frames into/from the latent space and RNN as a way to model the dynamics in the latent space. We improve the video generation consistency through temporally-conditional sampling and quality by structuring the latent space with attribute controls; ensuring that attributes can be both inferred and conditioned on during learning/generation. As a result, given attributes and/or the first frame, our model is able to generate diverse but highly consistent sets of video sequences, accounting for the inherent uncertainty in the prediction task. Experimental results on Chair CAD [1], Weizmann Human Action [2], and MIT Flickr [3] datasets, along with detailed comparison to the state-of-the-art, verify effectiveness of the framework.

Having a sensible prior of human pose is a vital ingredient for many computer vision applications, including tracking and pose estimation. While the application of global non-parametric approaches and parametric models has led to some success, finding the right balance in terms of flexibility and tractability, as well as estimating model parameters from data has turned out to be challenging. In this work, we introduce a sparse Bayesian network model of human pose that is non-parametric with respect to the estimation of both its graph structure and its local distributions. We describe an efficient sampling scheme for our model and show its tractability for the computation of exact log-likelihoods. We empirically validate our approach on the Human 3.6M dataset and demonstrate superior performance to global models and parametric networks. We further illustrate our model's ability to represent and compose poses not present in the training set (compositionality) and describe a speed-accuracy trade-off that allows realtime scoring of poses.