Department Talks

#### Learning to align images and surfaces

Talk
• 24 September 2018 • 11:00 12:00
• Iasonas Kokkinos
• Ground Floor Seminar Room (N0.002)

In this talk I will be presenting recent work on combining ideas from deformable models with deep learning. I will start by describing DenseReg and DensePose, two recently introduced systems for establishing dense correspondences between 2D images and 3D surface models in the wild'', namely in the presence of background, occlusions, and multiple objects. For DensePose in particular we introduce DensePose-COCO, a large-scale dataset for dense pose estimation, and DensePose-RCNN, a system which operates at multiple frames per second on a single GPU while handling multiple humans simultaneously. I will then present Deforming AutoEncoders, a method for unsupervised dense correspondence estimation. We show that we can disentangle deformations from appearance variation in an entirely unsupervised manner, and also provide promising results for a more thorough disentanglement of images into deformations, albedo and shading. Time permitting we will discuss a parallel line of work aiming at combining grouping with deep learning, and see how both grouping and correspondence can be understood as establishing associations between neurons.

Organizers: Vassilis Choutas

#### Automatic Understanding of the Visual World

Talk
• 26 April 2018 • 11:00 12:00
• Dr. Cordelia Schmid
• N3.022

One of the central problems of artificial intelligence is machine perception, i.e., the ability to understand the visual world based on input from sensors such as cameras. In this talk, I will present recent progress with respect to data generation using weak annotations, motion information and synthetic data. I will also discuss our recent results for action recognition, where human tubes and tubelets have shown to be successful. Our tubelets moves away from state-of-the-art frame based approaches and improve classification and localization by relying on joint information from several frames. I also show how to extend this type of method to weakly supervised learning of actions, which allows us to scale to large amounts of data with sparse manual annotation. Furthermore, I discuss several recent extensions, including 3D pose estimation.

Organizers: Ahmed Osman

#### Markerless Tracking of User-Defined Features with Deep Learning

Talk
• 17 April 2018 • 11:50 12:50
• Alexander Mathis
• Tübingen, Aquarium (N3.022)

Quantifying behavior is crucial for many applications in neuroscience. Videography provides easy methods for the observation and recording of animal behavior in diverse settings, yet extracting particular aspects of a behavior for further analysis can be highly time consuming. In motor control studies, humans or other animals are often marked with reflective markers to assist with computer-based tracking, yet markers are intrusive (especially for smaller animals), and the number and location of the markers must be determined a priori. Here, we present a highly efficient method for markerless tracking based on transfer learning with deep neural networks that achieves excellent results with minimal training data. We demonstrate the versatility of this framework by tracking various body parts in a broad collection of experimental settings: mice odor trail-tracking, egg-laying behavior in drosophila, and mouse hand articulation in a skilled forelimb task. For example, during the skilled reaching behavior, individual joints can be automatically tracked (and a confidence score is reported). Remarkably, even when a small number of frames are labeled (≈200), the algorithm achieves excellent tracking performance on test frames that is comparable to human accuracy.

Organizers: Melanie Feldhofer

#### BodyNet: Volumetric Inference of 3D Human Body Shapes

Talk
• 10 April 2018 • 16:00 17:00
• Gül Varol
• N3.022

Human shape estimation is an important task for video editing, animation and fashion industry. Predicting 3D human body shape from natural images, however, is highly challenging due to factors such as variation in human bodies, clothing and viewpoint. Prior methods addressing this problem typically attempt to fit parametric body models with certain priors on pose and shape. In this work we argue for an alternative representation and propose BodyNet, a neural network for direct inference of volumetric body shape from a single image. BodyNet is an end-to-end trainable network that benefits from (i) a volumetric 3D loss, (ii) a multi-view re-projection loss, and (iii) intermediate supervision of 2D pose, 2D body part segmentation, and 3D pose. Each of them results in performance improvement as demonstrated by our experiments. To evaluate the method, we fit the SMPL model to our network output and show state-of-the-art results on the SURREAL and Unite the People datasets, outperforming recent approaches. Besides achieving state-of-the-art performance, our method also enables volumetric body-part segmentation.

#### Deep Residual Neural Networks for Robust Footstep Recognition

Talk
• 28 March 2018 • 11:00 12:00
• Omar Costilla Reyes
• Aquarium @ PS

Human footsteps can provide a unique behavioural pattern for robust biometric systems. Traditionally, security systems have been based on passwords or security access cards. Biometric recognition deals with the design of security systems for automatic identification or verification of a human subject (client) based on physical and behavioural characteristics. In this talk, I will present spatio-temporal raw and processed footstep data representations designed and evaluated on deep machine learning models based on a two-stream resnet architecture, by using the SFootBD database the largest footstep database to date with more than 120 people and almost 20,000 footstep signals. Our models deliver an artificial intelligence capable of effectively differentiating the fine-grained variability of footsteps between legitimate users (clients) and impostor users of the biometric system. We provide experimental results in 3 critical data-driven security scenarios, according to the amount of footstep data available for model training: at airports security checkpoints (smallest training set), workspace environments (medium training set) and home environments (largest training set). In these scenarios we report state-of-the-art footstep recognition rates.

Organizers: Dimitris Tzionas

#### Capturing animal 3D articulated shape and appearance from images

Talk
• 27 March 2018 • 10:00 11:00
• Silvia Zuffi
• N3.022

Animals are widespread in nature and the analysis of their shape and motion is of importance in many fields and industries. Modeling 3D animal shape, however, is difficult because the 3D scanning methods used to capture human shape are not applicable to wild animals or natural settings. In our previous SMAL model, we learn animal shape from toys figurines, but toys are limited in number and realism, and not every animal is sufficiently popular for there to be realistic toys depicting it. What is available in large quantities are images and videos of animals from nature photographs, animal documentaries, and webcams. In this talk I will present our recent work for capturing the detailed 3D shape of animals from images alone. Our method extracts significantly more 3D shape detail than previous work and is able to model new species using only a few video frames. Additionally, we extract realistic texture map from images for capturing both animal shape and appearance.

#### Perception and action are inseparably intertwined: computational and experimental evidence

Talk
• 28 February 2018 • 13:30 14:45
• Prof. Constantin Rothkopf
• Tübingen, 3rd Floor Intelligent Systems: Aquarium

Active vision has long put forward the idea, that visual sensation and our actions are inseparable, especially when considering naturalistic extended behavior. Further support for this idea comes from theoretical work in optimal control, which demonstrates that sensing, planning, and acting in sequential tasks can only be separated under very restricted circumstances. The talk will present experimental evidence together with computational explanations of human visuomotor behavior in tasks ranging from classic psychophysical detection tasks to ball catching and visuomotor navigation. Along the way it will touch topics such as the heuristics hypothesis and learning of visual representations. The connecting theme will be that, from the switching of visuomotor behavior in response to changing task-constraints down to cortical visual representations in V1, action and perception are inseparably intertwined in an ambiguous and uncertain world

Organizers: Betty Mohler

#### Deriving a Tongue Model from MRI Data

Talk
• 20 February 2018 • 14:00 14:45
• Alexander Hewer
• Aquarium

The tongue plays a vital part in everyday life where we use it extensively during speech production. Due to this importance, we want to derive a parametric shape model of the tongue. This model enables us to reconstruct the full tongue shape from a sparse set of points, like for example motion capture data. Moreover, we can use such a model in simulations of the vocal tract to perform articulatory speech synthesis or to create animated virtual avatars. In my talk, I describe a framework for deriving such a model from MRI scans of the vocal tract. In particular, this framework uses image denoising and segmentation methods to produce a point cloud approximating the vocal tract surface. In this context, I will also discuss how palatal contacts of the tongue can be handled, i.e., situations where the tongue touches the palate and thus no tongue boundary is visible. Afterwards, template matching is used to derive a mesh representation of the tongue from this cloud. The acquired meshes are finally used to construct a multilinear model.

Organizers: Timo Bolkart

#### Appearance Modeling for 4D Multi-view Representations

Talk
• 15 December 2017 • 12:00 12:45
• Vagia Tsiminaki
• PS Seminar Room (N3.022)

The emergence of multi-view capture systems has yield a tremendous amount of video sequences. The task of capturing spatio-temporal models from real world imagery (4D modeling) should arguably benefit from this enormous visual information. In order to achieve highly realistic representations both geometry and appearance need to be modeled in high precision. Yet, even with the great progress of the geometric modeling, the appearance aspect has not been fully explored and visual quality can still be improved. I will explain how we can optimally exploit the redundant visual information of the captured video sequences and provide a temporally coherent, super-resolved, view-independent appearance representation. I will further discuss how to exploit the interdependency of both geometry and appearance as separate modalities to enhance visual perception and finally how to decompose appearance representations into intrinsic components (shading & albedo) and super-resolve them jointly to allow for more realistic renderings.

Organizers: Despoina Paschalidou

#### Reconstructing and Perceiving Humans in Motion

Talk
• 30 November 2017 • 15:00
• Dr. Gerard Pons-Moll

For man-machine interaction it is crucial to develop models of humans that look and move indistinguishably from real humans. Such virtual humans will be key for application areas such as computer vision, medicine and psychology, virtual and augmented reality and special effects in movies. Currently, digital models typically lack realistic soft tissue and clothing or require time-consuming manual editing of physical simulation parameters. Our hypothesis is that better and more realistic models of humans and clothing can be learned directly from real measurements coming from 4D scans, images and depth and inertial sensors. We combine statistical machine learning techniques and physics based simulation to create realistic models from data. We then use such models to extract information out of incomplete and noisy sensor data from monocular video, depth or IMUs. I will give an overview of a selection of projects conducted in Perceiving Systems in which we build realistic models of human pose, shape, soft-tissue and clothing. I will also present some of our recent work on 3D reconstruction of people models from monocular video, real-time fusion and online human body shape estimation from depth data and recovery of human pose in the wild from video and IMUs. I will conclude the talk outlining the next challenges in building digital humans and perceiving them from sensory data.

Organizers: Melanie Feldhofer

#### Operator splitting: a versatile framework for variational image processing tasks.

Talk
• 17 November 2017 • 12:00 13:00
• Christoph Mayer
• S2 Seminar Room (S 2.014)

Variational image processing translates image processing tasks into optimisation problems. The practical success of this approach depends on the type of optimisation problem and on the properties of the ensuing algorithm. A recent breakthrough was to realise that old first-order optimisation algorithms based on operator splitting are particularly suited for modern data analysis problems. Operator splitting techniques decouple complex optimisation problems into many smaller and simpler sub-problems. In this talk I will revise the variational segmentation problem and a common family of algorithms to solve such optimisation problems. I will show that operator splitting leads to a divide-and-conquer strategy that allows to derive simple and massively parallel updates suitable for GPU implementations. The technique decouples the likelihood from the prior term and allows to use a data-driven model estimating the likelihood from data, using for example deep learning. Using a different decoupling strategy together with general consensus optimisation leads to fully distributed algorithms especially suitable for large-scale segmentation problems. Motivating applications are 3d yeast-cell reconstruction and segmentation of histology data.

Organizers: Benjamin Coors