Many object pose estimation algorithms rely on the analysisby-synthesis framework which requires explicit representations of individual object instances. In this paper we combine a gradient-based fitting procedure with a parametric neural image synthesis module that is capable of implicitly representing the appearance, shape and pose of entire object categories, thus rendering the need for explicit CAD models per object instance unnecessary. The image synthesis network is designed to efficiently span the pose configuration space so that model capacity can be used to capture the shape and local appearance (i.e., texture) variations jointly. At inference time the synthesized images are compared to the target via an appearance based loss and the error signal is backpropagated through the network to the input parameters. Keeping the network parameters fixed, this allows for iterative optimization of the object pose, shape and appearance in a joint manner and we experimentally show that the method can recover orientation of objects with high accuracy from 2D images alone. When provided with depth measurements, to overcome scale ambiguities, the method can accurately recover the full 6DOF pose successfully.

Figure 1. We propose PINA, a method to acquire personalized and animatable neural avatars from RGB-D videos. Left: our method uses only a single sequence, captured via a commodity depth sensor. The depth frames are noisy and contain only partial views of the body. Middle: Using global optimization, we fuse these partial observations into an implicit surface representation that captures geometric details, such as loose clothing. The shape is learned alongside a pose-independent skinning field, supervised only via depth observations. Right: The learned avatar can be animated with realistic articulation-driven surface deformations and generalizes to novel unseen poses.

In this paper we contribute a simple yet effective approach for estimating 3D poses of multiple people from multi-view images. Our proposed coarse-to-fine pipeline first aggregates noisy 2D observations from multiple camera views into 3D space and then associates them into individual instances based on a confidence-aware majority voting technique. The final pose estimates are attained from a novel optimization scheme which links high-confidence multi-view 2D observations and 3D joint candidates. Moreover, a statistical parametric body model such as SMPL is leveraged as a regularizing prior for these 3D joint candidates. Specifically, both 3D poses and SMPL parameters are optimized jointly in an alternating fashion. Here the parametric models help in correcting implausible 3D pose estimates and filling in missing joint detections while updated 3D poses in turn guide obtaining better SMPL estimations. By linking 2D and 3D observations, our method is both accurate and generalizes to different data sources because it better decouples the final 3D pose from the interperson constellation and is more robust to noisy 2D detections. We systematically evaluate our method on public datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance. The code and video will be available on the project page: https://ait.ethz.ch/projects/2021/multi-human-pose/.

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Many object pose estimation algorithms rely on the analysisby-synthesis framework which requires explicit representations of individual object instances. In this paper we combine a gradient-based fitting procedure with a parametric neural image synthesis module that is capable of implicitly representing the appearance, shape and pose of entire object categories, thus rendering the need for explicit CAD models per object instance unnecessary. The image synthesis network is designed to efficiently span the pose configuration space so that model capacity can be used to capture the shape and local appearance (i.e., texture) variations jointly. At inference time the synthesized images are compared to the target via an appearance based loss and the error signal is backpropagated through the network to the input parameters. Keeping the network parameters fixed, this allows for iterative optimization of the object pose, shape and appearance in a joint manner and we experimentally show that the method can recover orientation of objects with high accuracy from 2D images alone. When provided with depth measurements, to overcome scale ambiguities, the method can accurately recover the full 6DOF pose successfully.