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51 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2019

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Generating 3D People in Scenes without People

Zhang, Y., Hassan, M., Neumann, H., Black, M. J., Tang, S.

arXiv:1912.02923, December 2019 (article)

Abstract
We present a fully-automatic system that takes a 3D scene and generates plausible 3D human bodies that are posed naturally in that 3D scene. Given a 3D scene without people, humans can easily imagine how people could interact with the scene and the objects in it. However, this is a challenging task for a computer as solving it requires (1) the generated human bodies should be semantically plausible with the 3D environment, e.g. people sitting on the sofa or cooking near the stove; (2) the generated human-scene interaction should be physically feasible in the way that the human body and scene do not interpenetrate while, at the same time, body-scene contact supports physical interactions. To that end, we make use of the surface-based 3D human model SMPL-X. We first train a conditional variational autoencoder to predict semantically plausible 3D human pose conditioned on latent scene representations, then we further refine the generated 3D bodies using scene constraints to enforce feasible physical interaction. We show that our approach is able to synthesize realistic and expressive 3D human bodies that naturally interact with 3D environment. We perform extensive experiments demonstrating that our generative framework compares favorably with existing methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We believe that our scene-conditioned 3D human generation pipeline will be useful for numerous applications; e.g. to generate training data for human pose estimation, in video games and in VR/AR.

PDF link (url) [BibTex]

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Learning Multi-Human Optical Flow

Ranjan, A., Hoffmann, D. T., Tzionas, D., Tang, S., Romero, J., Black, M. J.

International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), December 2019 (article)

Abstract
The optical flow of humans is well known to be useful for the analysis of human action. Recent optical flow methods focus on training deep networks to approach the problem. However, the training data used by them does not cover the domain of human motion. Therefore, we develop a dataset of multi-human optical flow and train optical flow networks on this dataset. We use a 3D model of the human body and motion capture data to synthesize realistic flow fields in both single-and multi-person images. We then train optical flow networks to estimate human flow fields from pairs of images. We demonstrate that our trained networks are more accurate than a wide range of top methods on held-out test data and that they can generalize well to real image sequences. The code, trained models and the dataset are available for research.

Paper poster link (url) DOI [BibTex]

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Attacking Optical Flow

Ranjan, A., Janai, J., Geiger, A., Black, M. J.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, November 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Deep neural nets achieve state-of-the-art performance on the problem of optical flow estimation. Since optical flow is used in several safety-critical applications like self-driving cars, it is important to gain insights into the robustness of those techniques. Recently, it has been shown that adversarial attacks easily fool deep neural networks to misclassify objects. The robustness of optical flow networks to adversarial attacks, however, has not been studied so far. In this paper, we extend adversarial patch attacks to optical flow networks and show that such attacks can compromise their performance. We show that corrupting a small patch of less than 1% of the image size can significantly affect optical flow estimates. Our attacks lead to noisy flow estimates that extend significantly beyond the region of the attack, in many cases even completely erasing the motion of objects in the scene. While networks using an encoder-decoder architecture are very sensitive to these attacks, we found that networks using a spatial pyramid architecture are less affected. We analyse the success and failure of attacking both architectures by visualizing their feature maps and comparing them to classical optical flow techniques which are robust to these attacks. We also demonstrate that such attacks are practical by placing a printed pattern into real scenes.

Video Project Page Paper Supplementary Material link (url) [BibTex]

Ranjan, A., Janai, J., Geiger, A., Black, M. J. Attacking Optical Flow In International Conference on Computer Vision, November 2019 (inproceedings)

Video Project Page Paper Supplementary Material link (url) [BibTex]

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Decoding subcategories of human bodies from both body- and face-responsive cortical regions

Foster, C., Zhao, M., Romero, J., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J., Bartels, A., Bülthoff, I.

NeuroImage, 202(15):116085, November 2019 (article)

Abstract
Our visual system can easily categorize objects (e.g. faces vs. bodies) and further differentiate them into subcategories (e.g. male vs. female). This ability is particularly important for objects of social significance, such as human faces and bodies. While many studies have demonstrated category selectivity to faces and bodies in the brain, how subcategories of faces and bodies are represented remains unclear. Here, we investigated how the brain encodes two prominent subcategories shared by both faces and bodies, sex and weight, and whether neural responses to these subcategories rely on low-level visual, high-level visual or semantic similarity. We recorded brain activity with fMRI while participants viewed faces and bodies that varied in sex, weight, and image size. The results showed that the sex of bodies can be decoded from both body- and face-responsive brain areas, with the former exhibiting more consistent size-invariant decoding than the latter. Body weight could also be decoded in face-responsive areas and in distributed body-responsive areas, and this decoding was also invariant to image size. The weight of faces could be decoded from the fusiform body area (FBA), and weight could be decoded across face and body stimuli in the extrastriate body area (EBA) and a distributed body-responsive area. The sex of well-controlled faces (e.g. excluding hairstyles) could not be decoded from face- or body-responsive regions. These results demonstrate that both face- and body-responsive brain regions encode information that can distinguish the sex and weight of bodies. Moreover, the neural patterns corresponding to sex and weight were invariant to image size and could sometimes generalize across face and body stimuli, suggesting that such subcategorical information is encoded with a high-level visual or semantic code.

paper pdf DOI [BibTex]

Foster, C., Zhao, M., Romero, J., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J., Bartels, A., Bülthoff, I. Decoding subcategories of human bodies from both body- and face-responsive cortical regions NeuroImage, 202(15):116085, November 2019 (article)

paper pdf DOI [BibTex]

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AirCap – Aerial Outdoor Motion Capture

Ahmad, A., Price, E., Tallamraju, R., Saini, N., Lawless, G., Ludwig, R., Martinovic, I., Bülthoff, H. H., Black, M. J.

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2019), Workshop on Aerial Swarms, November 2019 (misc)

Abstract
This paper presents an overview of the Grassroots project Aerial Outdoor Motion Capture (AirCap) running at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. AirCap's goal is to achieve markerless, unconstrained, human motion capture (mocap) in unknown and unstructured outdoor environments. To that end, we have developed an autonomous flying motion capture system using a team of aerial vehicles (MAVs) with only on-board, monocular RGB cameras. We have conducted several real robot experiments involving up to 3 aerial vehicles autonomously tracking and following a person in several challenging scenarios using our approach of active cooperative perception developed in AirCap. Using the images captured by these robots during the experiments, we have demonstrated a successful offline body pose and shape estimation with sufficiently high accuracy. Overall, we have demonstrated the first fully autonomous flying motion capture system involving multiple robots for outdoor scenarios.

Talk slides Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Ahmad, A., Price, E., Tallamraju, R., Saini, N., Lawless, G., Ludwig, R., Martinovic, I., Bülthoff, H. H., Black, M. J. AirCap – Aerial Outdoor Motion Capture IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2019), Workshop on Aerial Swarms, November 2019 (misc)

Talk slides Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop

Kolotouros, N., Pavlakos, G., Black, M. J., Daniilidis, K.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Model-based human pose estimation is currently approached through two different paradigms. Optimization-based methods fit a parametric body model to 2D observations in an iterative manner, leading to accurate image-model alignments, but are often slow and sensitive to the initialization. In contrast, regression-based methods, that use a deep network to directly estimate the model parameters from pixels, tend to provide reasonable, but not pixel accurate, results while requiring huge amounts of supervision. In this work, instead of investigating which approach is better, our key insight is that the two paradigms can form a strong collaboration. A reasonable, directly regressed estimate from the network can initialize the iterative optimization making the fitting faster and more accurate. Similarly, a pixel accurate fit from iterative optimization can act as strong supervision for the network. This is the core of our proposed approach SPIN (SMPL oPtimization IN the loop). The deep network initializes an iterative optimization routine that fits the body model to 2D joints within the training loop, and the fitted estimate is subsequently used to supervise the network. Our approach is self-improving by nature, since better network estimates can lead the optimization to better solutions, while more accurate optimization fits provide better supervision for the network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in different settings, where 3D ground truth is scarce, or not available, and we consistently outperform the state-of-the-art model-based pose estimation approaches by significant margins.

pdf code project [BibTex]

Kolotouros, N., Pavlakos, G., Black, M. J., Daniilidis, K. Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings)

pdf code project [BibTex]

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Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints

Hassan, M., Choutas, V., Tzionas, D., Black, M. J.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
To understand and analyze human behavior, we need to capture humans moving in, and interacting with, the world. Most existing methods perform 3D human pose estimation without explicitly considering the scene. We observe however that the world constrains the body and vice-versa. To motivate this, we show that current 3D human pose estimation methods produce results that are not consistent with the 3D scene. Our key contribution is to exploit static 3D scene structure to better estimate human pose from monocular images. The method enforces Proximal Relationships with Object eXclusion and is called PROX. To test this, we collect a new dataset composed of 12 different 3D scenes and RGB sequences of 20 subjects moving in and interacting with the scenes. We represent human pose using the 3D human body model SMPL-X and extend SMPLify-X to estimate body pose using scene constraints. We make use of the 3D scene information by formulating two main constraints. The interpenetration constraint penalizes intersection between the body model and the surrounding 3D scene. The contact constraint encourages specific parts of the body to be in contact with scene surfaces if they are close enough in distance and orientation. For quantitative evaluation we capture a separate dataset with 180 RGB frames in which the ground-truth body pose is estimated using a motion-capture system. We show quantitatively that introducing scene constraints significantly reduces 3D joint error and vertex error. Our code and data are available for research at https://prox.is.tue.mpg.de.

pdf poster link (url) [BibTex]

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End-to-end Learning for Graph Decomposition

Song, J., Andres, B., Black, M., Hilliges, O., Tang, S.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Deep neural networks provide powerful tools for pattern recognition, while classical graph algorithms are widely used to solve combinatorial problems. In computer vision, many tasks combine elements of both pattern recognition and graph reasoning. In this paper, we study how to connect deep networks with graph decomposition into an end-to-end trainable framework. More specifically, the minimum cost multicut problem is first converted to an unconstrained binary cubic formulation where cycle consistency constraints are incorporated into the objective function. The new optimization problem can be viewed as a Conditional Random Field (CRF) in which the random variables are associated with the binary edge labels. Cycle constraints are introduced into the CRF as high-order potentials. A standard Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) provides the front-end features for the fully differentiable CRF. The parameters of both parts are optimized in an end-to-end manner. The efficacy of the proposed learning algorithm is demonstrated via experiments on clustering MNIST images and on the challenging task of real-world multi-people pose estimation.

PDF [BibTex]

Song, J., Andres, B., Black, M., Hilliges, O., Tang, S. End-to-end Learning for Graph Decomposition In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings)

PDF [BibTex]

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Three-D Safari: Learning to Estimate Zebra Pose, Shape, and Texture from Images "In the Wild"

Zuffi, S., Kanazawa, A., Berger-Wolf, T., Black, M. J.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We present the first method to perform automatic 3D pose, shape and texture capture of animals from images acquired in-the-wild. In particular, we focus on the problem of capturing 3D information about Grevy's zebras from a collection of images. The Grevy's zebra is one of the most endangered species in Africa, with only a few thousand individuals left. Capturing the shape and pose of these animals can provide biologists and conservationists with information about animal health and behavior. In contrast to research on human pose, shape and texture estimation, training data for endangered species is limited, the animals are in complex natural scenes with occlusion, they are naturally camouflaged, travel in herds, and look similar to each other. To overcome these challenges, we integrate the recent SMAL animal model into a network-based regression pipeline, which we train end-to-end on synthetically generated images with pose, shape, and background variation. Going beyond state-of-the-art methods for human shape and pose estimation, our method learns a shape space for zebras during training. Learning such a shape space from images using only a photometric loss is novel, and the approach can be used to learn shape in other settings with limited 3D supervision. Moreover, we couple 3D pose and shape prediction with the task of texture synthesis, obtaining a full texture map of the animal from a single image. We show that the predicted texture map allows a novel per-instance unsupervised optimization over the network features. This method, SMALST (SMAL with learned Shape and Texture) goes beyond previous work, which assumed manual keypoints and/or segmentation, to regress directly from pixels to 3D animal shape, pose and texture. Code and data are available at https://github.com/silviazuffi/smalst

code pdf supmat iccv19 presentation Project Page [BibTex]

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Efficient Learning on Point Clouds With Basis Point Sets

Prokudin, S., Lassner, C., Romero, J.

International Conference on Computer Vision, pages: 4332-4341, October 2019 (conference)

Abstract
With an increased availability of 3D scanning technology, point clouds are moving into the focus of computer vision as a rich representation of everyday scenes. However, they are hard to handle for machine learning algorithms due to the unordered structure. One common approach is to apply voxelization, which dramatically increases the amount of data stored and at the same time loses details through discretization. Recently, deep learning models with hand-tailored architectures were proposed to handle point clouds directly and achieve input permutation invariance. However, these architectures use an increased number of parameters and are computationally inefficient. In this work we propose basis point sets as a highly efficient and fully general way to process point clouds with machine learning algorithms. Basis point sets are a residual representation that can be computed efficiently and can be used with standard neural network architectures. Using the proposed representation as the input to a relatively simple network allows us to match the performance of PointNet on a shape classification task while using three order of magnitudes less floating point operations. In a second experiment, we show how proposed representation can be used for obtaining high resolution meshes from noisy 3D scans. Here, our network achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art computationally intense multi-step frameworks, in one network pass that can be done in less than 1ms.

[BibTex]

Prokudin, S., Lassner, C., Romero, J. Efficient Learning on Point Clouds With Basis Point Sets International Conference on Computer Vision, pages: 4332-4341, October 2019 (conference)

[BibTex]

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Markerless Outdoor Human Motion Capture Using Multiple Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles

Saini, N., Price, E., Tallamraju, R., Enficiaud, R., Ludwig, R., Martinović, I., Ahmad, A., Black, M.

In International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (inproceedings) Accepted

Abstract
Capturing human motion in natural scenarios means moving motion capture out of the lab and into the wild. Typical approaches rely on fixed, calibrated, cameras and reflective markers on the body, significantly limiting the motions that can be captured. To make motion capture truly unconstrained, we describe the first fully autonomous outdoor capture system based on flying vehicles. We use multiple micro-aerial-vehicles(MAVs), each equipped with a monocular RGB camera, an IMU, and a GPS receiver module. These detect the person, optimize their position, and localize themselves approximately. We then develop a markerless motion capture method that is suitable for this challenging scenario with a distant subject, viewed from above, with approximately calibrated and moving cameras. We combine multiple state-of-the-art 2D joint detectors with a 3D human body model and a powerful prior on human pose. We jointly optimize for 3D body pose and camera pose to robustly fit the 2D measurements. To our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of outdoor, full-body, markerless motion capture from autonomous flying vehicles.

Code Data Video Paper Manuscript Project Page [BibTex]

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Active Perception based Formation Control for Multiple Aerial Vehicles

Tallamraju, R., Price, E., Ludwig, R., Karlapalem, K., Bülthoff, H. H., Black, M. J., Ahmad, A.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Robotics and Automation Letters, 4(4):4491-4498, IEEE, October 2019 (article)

Abstract
We present a novel robotic front-end for autonomous aerial motion-capture (mocap) in outdoor environments. In previous work, we presented an approach for cooperative detection and tracking (CDT) of a subject using multiple micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs). However, it did not ensure optimal view-point configurations of the MAVs to minimize the uncertainty in the person's cooperatively tracked 3D position estimate. In this article, we introduce an active approach for CDT. In contrast to cooperatively tracking only the 3D positions of the person, the MAVs can actively compute optimal local motion plans, resulting in optimal view-point configurations, which minimize the uncertainty in the tracked estimate. We achieve this by decoupling the goal of active tracking into a quadratic objective and non-convex constraints corresponding to angular configurations of the MAVs w.r.t. the person. We derive this decoupling using Gaussian observation model assumptions within the CDT algorithm. We preserve convexity in optimization by embedding all the non-convex constraints, including those for dynamic obstacle avoidance, as external control inputs in the MPC dynamics. Multiple real robot experiments and comparisons involving 3 MAVs in several challenging scenarios are presented.

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

Tallamraju, R., Price, E., Ludwig, R., Karlapalem, K., Bülthoff, H. H., Black, M. J., Ahmad, A. Active Perception based Formation Control for Multiple Aerial Vehicles IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Robotics and Automation Letters, 4(4):4491-4498, IEEE, October 2019 (article)

pdf DOI Project Page [BibTex]

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AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes

Mahmood, N., Ghorbani, N., Troje, N. F., Pons-Moll, G., Black, M. J.

International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2019 (conference)

Abstract
Large datasets are the cornerstone of recent advances in computer vision using deep learning. In contrast, existing human motion capture (mocap) datasets are small and the motions limited, hampering progress on learning models of human motion. While there are many different datasets available, they each use a different parameterization of the body, making it difficult to integrate them into a single meta dataset. To address this, we introduce AMASS, a large and varied database of human motion that unifies 15 different optical marker-based mocap datasets by representing them within a common framework and parameterization. We achieve this using a new method, MoSh++, that converts mocap data into realistic 3D human meshes represented by a rigged body model. Here we use SMPL [26], which is widely used and provides a standard skeletal representation as well as a fully rigged surface mesh. The method works for arbitrary marker-sets, while recovering soft-tissue dynamics and realistic hand motion. We evaluate MoSh++ and tune its hyper-parameters using a new dataset of 4D body scans that are jointly recorded with marker-based mocap. The consistent representation of AMASS makes it readily useful for animation, visualization, and generating training data for deep learning. Our dataset is significantly richer than previous human motion collections, having more than 40 hours of motion data, spanning over 300 subjects, more than 11000 motions, and is available for research at https://amass.is.tue.mpg.de/.

code pdf suppl arxiv project website video poster AMASS_Poster [BibTex]

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Method for providing a three dimensional body model

Loper, M., Mahmood, N., Black, M.

September 2019, U.S.~Patent 10,417,818 (misc)

Abstract
A method for providing a three-dimensional body model which may be applied for an animation, based on a moving body, wherein the method comprises providing a parametric three-dimensional body model, which allows shape and pose variations; applying a standard set of body markers; optimizing the set of body markers by generating an additional set of body markers and applying the same for providing 3D coordinate marker signals for capturing shape and pose of the body and dynamics of soft tissue; and automatically providing an animation by processing the 3D coordinate marker signals in order to provide a personalized three-dimensional body model, based on estimated shape and an estimated pose of the body by means of predicted marker locations.

MoSh Project pdf [BibTex]

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Learning to Train with Synthetic Humans

Hoffmann, D. T., Tzionas, D., Black, M. J., Tang, S.

In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), September 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Neural networks need big annotated datasets for training. However, manual annotation can be too expensive or even unfeasible for certain tasks, like multi-person 2D pose estimation with severe occlusions. A remedy for this is synthetic data with perfect ground truth. Here we explore two variations of synthetic data for this challenging problem; a dataset with purely synthetic humans, as well as a real dataset augmented with synthetic humans. We then study which approach better generalizes to real data, as well as the influence of virtual humans in the training loss. We observe that not all synthetic samples are equally informative for training, while the informative samples are different for each training stage. To exploit this observation, we employ an adversarial student-teacher framework; the teacher improves the student by providing the hardest samples for its current state as a challenge. Experiments show that this student-teacher framework outperforms all our baselines.

pdf suppl poster link (url) [BibTex]

Hoffmann, D. T., Tzionas, D., Black, M. J., Tang, S. Learning to Train with Synthetic Humans In German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), September 2019 (inproceedings)

pdf suppl poster link (url) [BibTex]

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The Influence of Visual Perspective on Body Size Estimation in Immersive Virtual Reality

Thaler, A., Pujades, S., Stefanucci, J. K., Creem-Regehr, S. H., Tesch, J., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J.

In ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, September 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
The creation of realistic self-avatars that users identify with is important for many virtual reality applications. However, current approaches for creating biometrically plausible avatars that represent a particular individual require expertise and are time-consuming. We investigated the visual perception of an avatar’s body dimensions by asking males and females to estimate their own body weight and shape on a virtual body using a virtual reality avatar creation tool. In a method of adjustment task, the virtual body was presented in an HTC Vive head-mounted display either co-located with (first-person perspective) or facing (third-person perspective) the participants. Participants adjusted the body weight and dimensions of various body parts to match their own body shape and size. Both males and females underestimated their weight by 10-20% in the virtual body, but the estimates of the other body dimensions were relatively accurate and within a range of ±6%. There was a stronger influence of visual perspective on the estimates for males, but this effect was dependent on the amount of control over the shape of the virtual body, indicating that the results might be caused by where in the body the weight changes expressed themselves. These results suggest that this avatar creation tool could be used to allow participants to make a relatively accurate self-avatar in terms of adjusting body part dimensions, but not weight, and that the influence of visual perspective and amount of control needed over the body shape are likely gender-specific.

pdf [BibTex]

Thaler, A., Pujades, S., Stefanucci, J. K., Creem-Regehr, S. H., Tesch, J., Black, M. J., Mohler, B. J. The Influence of Visual Perspective on Body Size Estimation in Immersive Virtual Reality In ACM Symposium on Applied Perception, September 2019 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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3D Morphable Face Models - Past, Present and Future

Egger, B., Smith, W. A. P., Tewari, A., Wuhrer, S., Zollhoefer, M., Beeler, T., Bernard, F., Bolkart, T., Kortylewski, A., Romdhani, S., Theobalt, C., Blanz, V., Vetter, T.

arxiv preprint arXiv:1909.01815, September 2019 (article)

Abstract
In this paper, we provide a detailed survey of 3D Morphable Face Models over the 20 years since they were first proposed. The challenges in building and applying these models, namely capture, modeling, image formation,and image analysis, are still active research topics, and we review the state-of-the-art in each of these areas. We also look ahead, identifying unsolved challenges, proposing directions for future research and highlighting the broad range of current and future applications.

paper project page [BibTex]

Egger, B., Smith, W. A. P., Tewari, A., Wuhrer, S., Zollhoefer, M., Beeler, T., Bernard, F., Bolkart, T., Kortylewski, A., Romdhani, S., Theobalt, C., Blanz, V., Vetter, T. 3D Morphable Face Models - Past, Present and Future arxiv preprint arXiv:1909.01815, September 2019 (article)

paper project page [BibTex]

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Motion Planning for Multi-Mobile-Manipulator Payload Transport Systems

Tallamraju, R., Salunkhe, D., Rajappa, S., Ahmad, A., Karlapalem, K., Shah, S. V.

In 15th IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, IEEE, August 2019 (inproceedings) Accepted

[BibTex]

Tallamraju, R., Salunkhe, D., Rajappa, S., Ahmad, A., Karlapalem, K., Shah, S. V. Motion Planning for Multi-Mobile-Manipulator Payload Transport Systems In 15th IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, IEEE, August 2019 (inproceedings) Accepted

[BibTex]

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Competitive Collaboration: Joint Unsupervised Learning of Depth, Camera Motion, Optical Flow and Motion Segmentation

Ranjan, A., Jampani, V., Balles, L., Kim, K., Sun, D., Wulff, J., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
We address the unsupervised learning of several interconnected problems in low-level vision: single view depth prediction, camera motion estimation, optical flow, and segmentation of a video into the static scene and moving regions. Our key insight is that these four fundamental vision problems are coupled through geometric constraints. Consequently, learning to solve them together simplifies the problem because the solutions can reinforce each other. We go beyond previous work by exploiting geometry more explicitly and segmenting the scene into static and moving regions. To that end, we introduce Competitive Collaboration, a framework that facilitates the coordinated training of multiple specialized neural networks to solve complex problems. Competitive Collaboration works much like expectation-maximization, but with neural networks that act as both competitors to explain pixels that correspond to static or moving regions, and as collaborators through a moderator that assigns pixels to be either static or independently moving. Our novel method integrates all these problems in a common framework and simultaneously reasons about the segmentation of the scene into moving objects and the static background, the camera motion, depth of the static scene structure, and the optical flow of moving objects. Our model is trained without any supervision and achieves state-of-the-art performance among joint unsupervised methods on all sub-problems.

Paper link (url) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Local Temporal Bilinear Pooling for Fine-grained Action Parsing

Zhang, Y., Tang, S., Muandet, K., Jarvers, C., Neumann, H.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Fine-grained temporal action parsing is important in many applications, such as daily activity understanding, human motion analysis, surgical robotics and others requiring subtle and precise operations in a long-term period. In this paper we propose a novel bilinear pooling operation, which is used in intermediate layers of a temporal convolutional encoder-decoder net. In contrast to other work, our proposed bilinear pooling is learnable and hence can capture more complex local statistics than the conventional counterpart. In addition, we introduce exact lower-dimension representations of our bilinear forms, so that the dimensionality is reduced with neither information loss nor extra computation. We perform intensive experiments to quantitatively analyze our model and show the superior performances to other state-of-the-art work on various datasets.

Code video demo pdf link (url) [BibTex]

Zhang, Y., Tang, S., Muandet, K., Jarvers, C., Neumann, H. Local Temporal Bilinear Pooling for Fine-grained Action Parsing In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Code video demo pdf link (url) [BibTex]

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Learning to Regress 3D Face Shape and Expression from an Image without 3D Supervision

Sanyal, S., Bolkart, T., Feng, H., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
The estimation of 3D face shape from a single image must be robust to variations in lighting, head pose, expression, facial hair, makeup, and occlusions. Robustness requires a large training set of in-the-wild images, which by construction, lack ground truth 3D shape. To train a network without any 2D-to-3D supervision, we present RingNet, which learns to compute 3D face shape from a single image. Our key observation is that an individual’s face shape is constant across images, regardless of expression, pose, lighting, etc. RingNet leverages multiple images of a person and automatically detected 2D face features. It uses a novel loss that encourages the face shape to be similar when the identity is the same and different for different people. We achieve invariance to expression by representing the face using the FLAME model. Once trained, our method takes a single image and outputs the parameters of FLAME, which can be readily animated. Additionally we create a new database of faces “not quite in-the-wild” (NoW) with 3D head scans and high-resolution images of the subjects in a wide variety of conditions. We evaluate publicly available methods and find that RingNet is more accurate than methods that use 3D supervision. The dataset, model, and results are available for research purposes.

code pdf preprint link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

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Learning Joint Reconstruction of Hands and Manipulated Objects

Hasson, Y., Varol, G., Tzionas, D., Kalevatykh, I., Black, M. J., Laptev, I., Schmid, C.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Estimating hand-object manipulations is essential for interpreting and imitating human actions. Previous work has made significant progress towards reconstruction of hand poses and object shapes in isolation. Yet, reconstructing hands and objects during manipulation is a more challenging task due to significant occlusions of both the hand and object. While presenting challenges, manipulations may also simplify the problem since the physics of contact restricts the space of valid hand-object configurations. For example, during manipulation, the hand and object should be in contact but not interpenetrate. In this work, we regularize the joint reconstruction of hands and objects with manipulation constraints. We present an end-to-end learnable model that exploits a novel contact loss that favors physically plausible hand-object constellations. Our approach improves grasp quality metrics over baselines, using RGB images as input. To train and evaluate the model, we also propose a new large-scale synthetic dataset, ObMan, with hand-object manipulations. We demonstrate the transferability of ObMan-trained models to real data.

pdf suppl poster link (url) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

Hasson, Y., Varol, G., Tzionas, D., Kalevatykh, I., Black, M. J., Laptev, I., Schmid, C. Learning Joint Reconstruction of Hands and Manipulated Objects In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

pdf suppl poster link (url) Project Page Project Page [BibTex]

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Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image

Pavlakos, G., Choutas, V., Ghorbani, N., Bolkart, T., Osman, A. A. A., Tzionas, D., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
To facilitate the analysis of human actions, interactions and emotions, we compute a 3D model of human body pose, hand pose, and facial expression from a single monocular image. To achieve this, we use thousands of 3D scans to train a new, unified, 3D model of the human body, SMPL-X, that extends SMPL with fully articulated hands and an expressive face. Learning to regress the parameters of SMPL-X directly from images is challenging without paired images and 3D ground truth. Consequently, we follow the approach of SMPLify, which estimates 2D features and then optimizes model parameters to fit the features. We improve on SMPLify in several significant ways: (1) we detect 2D features corresponding to the face, hands, and feet and fit the full SMPL-X model to these; (2) we train a new neural network pose prior using a large MoCap dataset; (3) we define a new interpenetration penalty that is both fast and accurate; (4) we automatically detect gender and the appropriate body models (male, female, or neutral); (5) our PyTorch implementation achieves a speedup of more than 8x over Chumpy. We use the new method, SMPLify-X, to fit SMPL-X to both controlled images and images in the wild. We evaluate 3D accuracy on a new curated dataset comprising 100 images with pseudo ground-truth. This is a step towards automatic expressive human capture from monocular RGB data. The models, code, and data are available for research purposes at https://smpl-x.is.tue.mpg.de.

video code pdf suppl poster link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

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Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles

Cudeiro, D., Bolkart, T., Laidlaw, C., Ranjan, A., Black, M. J.

In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Audio-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, but achieving realistic, human-like performance is still unsolved. This is due to the lack of available 3D datasets, models, and standard evaluation metrics. To address this, we introduce a unique 4D face dataset with about 29 minutes of 4D scans captured at 60 fps and synchronized audio from 12 speakers. We then train a neural network on our dataset that factors identity from facial motion. The learned model, VOCA (Voice Operated Character Animation) takes any speech signal as input—even speech in languages other than English—and realistically animates a wide range of adult faces. Conditioning on subject labels during training allows the model to learn a variety of realistic speaking styles. VOCA also provides animator controls to alter speaking style, identity-dependent facial shape, and pose (i.e. head, jaw, and eyeball rotations) during animation. To our knowledge, VOCA is the only realistic 3D facial animation model that is readily applicable to unseen subjects without retargeting. This makes VOCA suitable for tasks like in-game video, virtual reality avatars, or any scenario in which the speaker, speech, or language is not known in advance. We make the dataset and model available for research purposes at http://voca.is.tue.mpg.de.

code Project Page video paper [BibTex]

Cudeiro, D., Bolkart, T., Laidlaw, C., Ranjan, A., Black, M. J. Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles In Proceedings IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2019 (inproceedings)

code Project Page video paper [BibTex]

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Learning and Tracking the 3D Body Shape of Freely Moving Infants from RGB-D sequences

Hesse, N., Pujades, S., Black, M., Arens, M., Hofmann, U., Schroeder, S.

Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2019 (article)

Abstract
Statistical models of the human body surface are generally learned from thousands of high-quality 3D scans in predefined poses to cover the wide variety of human body shapes and articulations. Acquisition of such data requires expensive equipment, calibration procedures, and is limited to cooperative subjects who can understand and follow instructions, such as adults. We present a method for learning a statistical 3D Skinned Multi-Infant Linear body model (SMIL) from incomplete, low-quality RGB-D sequences of freely moving infants. Quantitative experiments show that SMIL faithfully represents the RGB-D data and properly factorizes the shape and pose of the infants. To demonstrate the applicability of SMIL, we fit the model to RGB-D sequences of freely moving infants and show, with a case study, that our method captures enough motion detail for General Movements Assessment (GMA), a method used in clinical practice for early detection of neurodevelopmental disorders in infants. SMIL provides a new tool for analyzing infant shape and movement and is a step towards an automated system for GMA.

pdf Journal DOI [BibTex]

Hesse, N., Pujades, S., Black, M., Arens, M., Hofmann, U., Schroeder, S. Learning and Tracking the 3D Body Shape of Freely Moving Infants from RGB-D sequences Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2019 (article)

pdf Journal DOI [BibTex]

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Perceptual Effects of Inconsistency in Human Animations

Kenny, S., Mahmood, N., Honda, C., Black, M. J., Troje, N. F.

ACM Trans. Appl. Percept., 16(1):2:1-2:18, Febuary 2019 (article)

Abstract
The individual shape of the human body, including the geometry of its articulated structure and the distribution of weight over that structure, influences the kinematics of a person’s movements. How sensitive is the visual system to inconsistencies between shape and motion introduced by retargeting motion from one person onto the shape of another? We used optical motion capture to record five pairs of male performers with large differences in body weight, while they pushed, lifted, and threw objects. From these data, we estimated both the kinematics of the actions as well as the performer’s individual body shape. To obtain consistent and inconsistent stimuli, we created animated avatars by combining the shape and motion estimates from either a single performer or from different performers. Using these stimuli we conducted three experiments in an immersive virtual reality environment. First, a group of participants detected which of two stimuli was inconsistent. Performance was very low, and results were only marginally significant. Next, a second group of participants rated perceived attractiveness, eeriness, and humanness of consistent and inconsistent stimuli, but these judgements of animation characteristics were not affected by consistency of the stimuli. Finally, a third group of participants rated properties of the objects rather than of the performers. Here, we found strong influences of shape-motion inconsistency on perceived weight and thrown distance of objects. This suggests that the visual system relies on its knowledge of shape and motion and that these components are assimilated into an altered perception of the action outcome. We propose that the visual system attempts to resist inconsistent interpretations of human animations. Actions involving object manipulations present an opportunity for the visual system to reinterpret the introduced inconsistencies as a change in the dynamics of an object rather than as an unexpected combination of body shape and body motion.

publisher pdf DOI [BibTex]

Kenny, S., Mahmood, N., Honda, C., Black, M. J., Troje, N. F. Perceptual Effects of Inconsistency in Human Animations ACM Trans. Appl. Percept., 16(1):2:1-2:18, Febuary 2019 (article)

publisher pdf DOI [BibTex]

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Perceiving Systems (2016-2018)
Scientific Advisory Board Report, 2019 (misc)

pdf [BibTex]

Perceiving Systems (2016-2018) Scientific Advisory Board Report, 2019 (misc)

pdf [BibTex]

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The Virtual Caliper: Rapid Creation of Metrically Accurate Avatars from 3D Measurements

Pujades, S., Mohler, B., Thaler, A., Tesch, J., Mahmood, N., Hesse, N., Bülthoff, H. H., Black, M. J.

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 25, pages: 1887,1897, IEEE, 2019 (article)

Abstract
Creating metrically accurate avatars is important for many applications such as virtual clothing try-on, ergonomics, medicine, immersive social media, telepresence, and gaming. Creating avatars that precisely represent a particular individual is challenging however, due to the need for expensive 3D scanners, privacy issues with photographs or videos, and difficulty in making accurate tailoring measurements. We overcome these challenges by creating “The Virtual Caliper”, which uses VR game controllers to make simple measurements. First, we establish what body measurements users can reliably make on their own body. We find several distance measurements to be good candidates and then verify that these are linearly related to 3D body shape as represented by the SMPL body model. The Virtual Caliper enables novice users to accurately measure themselves and create an avatar with their own body shape. We evaluate the metric accuracy relative to ground truth 3D body scan data, compare the method quantitatively to other avatar creation tools, and perform extensive perceptual studies. We also provide a software application to the community that enables novices to rapidly create avatars in fewer than five minutes. Not only is our approach more rapid than existing methods, it exports a metrically accurate 3D avatar model that is rigged and skinned.

Project Page IEEE Open Access IEEE Open Access PDF DOI [BibTex]

Pujades, S., Mohler, B., Thaler, A., Tesch, J., Mahmood, N., Hesse, N., Bülthoff, H. H., Black, M. J. The Virtual Caliper: Rapid Creation of Metrically Accurate Avatars from 3D Measurements IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 25, pages: 1887,1897, IEEE, 2019 (article)

Project Page IEEE Open Access IEEE Open Access PDF DOI [BibTex]

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Resisting Adversarial Attacks using Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders

Ghosh, P., Losalka, A., Black, M. J.

In Proc. AAAI, 2019 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Susceptibility of deep neural networks to adversarial attacks poses a major theoretical and practical challenge. All efforts to harden classifiers against such attacks have seen limited success till now. Two distinct categories of samples against which deep neural networks are vulnerable, ``adversarial samples" and ``fooling samples", have been tackled separately so far due to the difficulty posed when considered together. In this work, we show how one can defend against them both under a unified framework. Our model has the form of a variational autoencoder with a Gaussian mixture prior on the latent variable, such that each mixture component corresponds to a single class. We show how selective classification can be performed using this model, thereby causing the adversarial objective to entail a conflict. The proposed method leads to the rejection of adversarial samples instead of misclassification, while maintaining high precision and recall on test data. It also inherently provides a way of learning a selective classifier in a semi-supervised scenario, which can similarly resist adversarial attacks. We further show how one can reclassify the detected adversarial samples by iterative optimization.

link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

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From Variational to Deterministic Autoencoders

Ghosh*, P., Sajjadi*, M. S. M., Vergari, A., Black, M. J., Schölkopf, B.

2019, *equal contribution (conference) Submitted

Abstract
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) provide a theoretically-backed framework for deep generative models. However, they often produce “blurry” images, which is linked to their training objective. Sampling in the most popular implementation, the Gaussian VAE, can be interpreted as simply injecting noise to the input of a deterministic decoder. In practice, this simply enforces a smooth latent space structure. We challenge the adoption of the full VAE framework on this specific point in favor of a simpler, deterministic one. Specifically, we investigate how substituting stochasticity with other explicit and implicit regularization schemes can lead to a meaningful latent space without having to force it to conform to an arbitrarily chosen prior. To retrieve a generative mechanism for sampling new data points, we propose to employ an efficient ex-post density estimation step that can be readily adopted both for the proposed deterministic autoencoders as well as to improve sample quality of existing VAEs. We show in a rigorous empirical study that regularized deterministic autoencoding achieves state-of-the-art sample quality on the common MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CelebA datasets.

arXiv [BibTex]

2004

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Automatic spike sorting for neural decoding

Wood, F. D., Fellows, M., Donoghue, J. P., Black, M. J.

In Proc. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, pages: 4009-4012, September 2004 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

2004

Wood, F. D., Fellows, M., Donoghue, J. P., Black, M. J. Automatic spike sorting for neural decoding In Proc. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, pages: 4009-4012, September 2004 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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Closed-loop neural control of cursor motion using a Kalman filter

Wu, W., Shaikhouni, A., Donoghue, J. P., Black, M. J.

In Proc. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, pages: 4126-4129, September 2004 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Wu, W., Shaikhouni, A., Donoghue, J. P., Black, M. J. Closed-loop neural control of cursor motion using a Kalman filter In Proc. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, pages: 4126-4129, September 2004 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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The dense estimation of motion and appearance in layers

Yalcin, H., Black, M. J., Fablet, R.

In IEEE Workshop on Image and Video Registration, June 2004 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Yalcin, H., Black, M. J., Fablet, R. The dense estimation of motion and appearance in layers In IEEE Workshop on Image and Video Registration, June 2004 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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3D human limb detection using space carving and multi-view eigen models

Bhatia, S., Sigal, L., Isard, M., Black, M. J.

In IEEE Workshop on Articulated and Nonrigid Motion, June 2004 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Bhatia, S., Sigal, L., Isard, M., Black, M. J. 3D human limb detection using space carving and multi-view eigen models In IEEE Workshop on Articulated and Nonrigid Motion, June 2004 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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On the variability of manual spike sorting

Wood, F., Black, M. J., Vargas-Irwin, C., Fellows, M., Donoghue, J. P.

IEEE Trans. Biomedical Engineering, 51(6):912-918, June 2004 (article)

pdf pdf from publisher [BibTex]

Wood, F., Black, M. J., Vargas-Irwin, C., Fellows, M., Donoghue, J. P. On the variability of manual spike sorting IEEE Trans. Biomedical Engineering, 51(6):912-918, June 2004 (article)

pdf pdf from publisher [BibTex]

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Tracking loose-limbed people

Sigal, L., Bhatia, S., Roth, S., Black, M. J., Isard, M.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1, pages: 421-428, June 2004 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Sigal, L., Bhatia, S., Roth, S., Black, M. J., Isard, M. Tracking loose-limbed people In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1, pages: 421-428, June 2004 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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Modeling and decoding motor cortical activity using a switching Kalman filter

Wu, W., Black, M. J., Mumford, D., Gao, Y., Bienenstock, E., Donoghue, J. P.

IEEE Trans. Biomedical Engineering, 51(6):933-942, June 2004 (article)

Abstract
We present a switching Kalman filter model for the real-time inference of hand kinematics from a population of motor cortical neurons. Firing rates are modeled as a Gaussian mixture where the mean of each Gaussian component is a linear function of hand kinematics. A “hidden state” models the probability of each mixture component and evolves over time in a Markov chain. The model generalizes previous encoding and decoding methods, addresses the non-Gaussian nature of firing rates, and can cope with crudely sorted neural data common in on-line prosthetic applications.

pdf pdf from publisher [BibTex]

Wu, W., Black, M. J., Mumford, D., Gao, Y., Bienenstock, E., Donoghue, J. P. Modeling and decoding motor cortical activity using a switching Kalman filter IEEE Trans. Biomedical Engineering, 51(6):933-942, June 2004 (article)

pdf pdf from publisher [BibTex]

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Gibbs likelihoods for Bayesian tracking

Roth, S., Sigal, L., Black, M. J.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1, pages: 886-893, June 2004 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Roth, S., Sigal, L., Black, M. J. Gibbs likelihoods for Bayesian tracking In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 1, pages: 886-893, June 2004 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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Development of neural motor prostheses for humans

Donoghue, J., Nurmikko, A., Friehs, G., Black, M.

In Advances in Clinical Neurophysiology, (Editors: Hallett, M. and Phillips, L.H. and Schomer, D.L. and Massey, J.M.), Supplements to Clinical Neurophysiology Vol. 57, 2004 (incollection)

pdf [BibTex]

Donoghue, J., Nurmikko, A., Friehs, G., Black, M. Development of neural motor prostheses for humans In Advances in Clinical Neurophysiology, (Editors: Hallett, M. and Phillips, L.H. and Schomer, D.L. and Massey, J.M.), Supplements to Clinical Neurophysiology Vol. 57, 2004 (incollection)

pdf [BibTex]

no image
A direct brain-machine interface for 2D cursor control using a Kalman filter

Shaikhouni, A., Wu, W., Moris, D. S., Donoghue, J. P., Black, M. J.

Society for Neuroscience, 2004, Online (conference)

abstract [BibTex]

Shaikhouni, A., Wu, W., Moris, D. S., Donoghue, J. P., Black, M. J. A direct brain-machine interface for 2D cursor control using a Kalman filter Society for Neuroscience, 2004, Online (conference)

abstract [BibTex]

1999

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Edges as outliers: Anisotropic smoothing using local image statistics

Black, M. J., Sapiro, G.

In Scale-Space Theories in Computer Vision, Second Int. Conf., Scale-Space ’99, pages: 259-270, LNCS 1682, Springer, Corfu, Greece, September 1999 (inproceedings)

Abstract
Edges are viewed as statistical outliers with respect to local image gradient magnitudes. Within local image regions we compute a robust statistical measure of the gradient variation and use this in an anisotropic diffusion framework to determine a spatially varying "edge-stopping" parameter σ. We show how to determine this parameter for two edge-stopping functions described in the literature (Perona-Malik and the Tukey biweight). Smoothing of the image is related the local texture and in regions of low texture, small gradient values may be treated as edges whereas in regions of high texture, large gradient magnitudes are necessary before an edge is preserved. Intuitively these results have similarities with human perceptual phenomena such as masking and "popout". Results are shown on a variety of standard images.

pdf [BibTex]

1999

Black, M. J., Sapiro, G. Edges as outliers: Anisotropic smoothing using local image statistics In Scale-Space Theories in Computer Vision, Second Int. Conf., Scale-Space ’99, pages: 259-270, LNCS 1682, Springer, Corfu, Greece, September 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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Probabilistic detection and tracking of motion discontinuities

(Marr Prize, Honorable Mention)

Black, M. J., Fleet, D. J.

In Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, ICCV-99, pages: 551-558, ICCV, Corfu, Greece, September 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

Black, M. J., Fleet, D. J. Probabilistic detection and tracking of motion discontinuities In Int. Conf. on Computer Vision, ICCV-99, pages: 551-558, ICCV, Corfu, Greece, September 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf [BibTex]

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Artscience Sciencart

Black, M. J., Levy, D., PamelaZ,

In Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program, pages: 244-300, (Editors: Harris, C.), MIT-Press, 1999 (incollection)

Abstract
One of the effects of the PARC Artist In Residence (PAIR) program has been to expose the strong connections between scientists and artists. Both do what they do because they need to do it. They are often called upon to justify their work in order to be allowed to continue to do it. They need to justify it to funders, to sponsoring institutions, corporations, the government, the public. They publish papers, teach workshops, and write grants touting the educational or health benefits of what they do. All of these things are to some extent valid, but the fact of the matter is: artists and scientists do their work because they are driven to do it. They need to explore and create.

This chapter attempts to give a flavor of one multi-way "PAIRing" between performance artist PamelaZ and two PARC researchers, Michael Black and David Levy. The three of us paired up because we found each other interesting. We chose each other. While most artists in the program are paired with a single researcher Pamela jokingly calls herself a bigamist for choosing two PAIR "husbands" with different backgrounds and interests.

There are no "rules" to the PAIR program; no one told us what to do with our time. Despite this we all had a sense that we needed to produce something tangible during Pamela's year-long residency. In fact, Pamela kept extending her residency because she did not feel as though we had actually made anything concrete. The interesting thing was that all along we were having great conversations, some of which Pamela recorded. What we did not see at the time was that it was these conversations between artists and scientists that are at the heart of the PAIR program and that these conversations were changing the way we thought about our own work and the relationships between science and art.

To give these conversations their due, and to allow the reader into our PAIR interactions, we include two of our many conversations in this chapter.

[BibTex]

Black, M. J., Levy, D., PamelaZ, Artscience Sciencart In Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program, pages: 244-300, (Editors: Harris, C.), MIT-Press, 1999 (incollection)

[BibTex]

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Parameterized modeling and recognition of activities

Yacoob, Y., Black, M. J.

Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 73(2):232-247, 1999 (article)

Abstract
In this paper we consider a class of human activities—atomic activities—which can be represented as a set of measurements over a finite temporal window (e.g., the motion of human body parts during a walking cycle) and which has a relatively small space of variations in performance. A new approach for modeling and recognition of atomic activities that employs principal component analysis and analytical global transformations is proposed. The modeling of sets of exemplar instances of activities that are similar in duration and involve similar body part motions is achieved by parameterizing their representation using principal component analysis. The recognition of variants of modeled activities is achieved by searching the space of admissible parameterized transformations that these activities can undergo. This formulation iteratively refines the recognition of the class to which the observed activity belongs and the transformation parameters that relate it to the model in its class. We provide several experiments on recognition of articulated and deformable human motions from image motion parameters.

pdf pdf from publisher DOI [BibTex]

Yacoob, Y., Black, M. J. Parameterized modeling and recognition of activities Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 73(2):232-247, 1999 (article)

pdf pdf from publisher DOI [BibTex]

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Explaining optical flow events with parameterized spatio-temporal models

Black, M. J.

In IEEE Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR’99, pages: 326-332, IEEE, Fort Collins, CO, 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf video [BibTex]

Black, M. J. Explaining optical flow events with parameterized spatio-temporal models In IEEE Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR’99, pages: 326-332, IEEE, Fort Collins, CO, 1999 (inproceedings)

pdf video [BibTex]

1994

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Estimating multiple independent motions in segmented images using parametric models with local deformations

Black, M. J., Jepson, A.

In Workshop on Non-rigid and Articulate Motion, pages: 220-227, Austin, Texas, November 1994 (inproceedings)

pdf abstract [BibTex]

1994

Black, M. J., Jepson, A. Estimating multiple independent motions in segmented images using parametric models with local deformations In Workshop on Non-rigid and Articulate Motion, pages: 220-227, Austin, Texas, November 1994 (inproceedings)

pdf abstract [BibTex]

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Time to contact from active tracking of motion boundaries

Ju, X., Black, M. J.

In Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XIII: 3D Vision, Product Inspection, and Active Vision, pages: 26-37, Proc. SPIE 2354, Boston, Massachusetts, November 1994 (inproceedings)

pdf abstract [BibTex]

Ju, X., Black, M. J. Time to contact from active tracking of motion boundaries In Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XIII: 3D Vision, Product Inspection, and Active Vision, pages: 26-37, Proc. SPIE 2354, Boston, Massachusetts, November 1994 (inproceedings)

pdf abstract [BibTex]

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A computational and evolutionary perspective on the role of representation in computer vision

Tarr, M. J., Black, M. J.

CVGIP: Image Understanding, 60(1):65-73, July 1994 (article)

Abstract
Recently, the assumed goal of computer vision, reconstructing a representation of the scene, has been critcized as unproductive and impractical. Critics have suggested that the reconstructive approach should be supplanted by a new purposive approach that emphasizes functionality and task driven perception at the cost of general vision. In response to these arguments, we claim that the recovery paradigm central to the reconstructive approach is viable, and, moreover, provides a promising framework for understanding and modeling general purpose vision in humans and machines. An examination of the goals of vision from an evolutionary perspective and a case study involving the recovery of optic flow support this hypothesis. In particular, while we acknowledge that there are instances where the purposive approach may be appropriate, these are insufficient for implementing the wide range of visual tasks exhibited by humans (the kind of flexible vision system presumed to be an end-goal of artificial intelligence). Furthermore, there are instances, such as recent work on the estimation of optic flow, where the recovery paradigm may yield useful and robust results. Thus, contrary to certain claims, the purposive approach does not obviate the need for recovery and reconstruction of flexible representations of the world.

pdf [BibTex]

Tarr, M. J., Black, M. J. A computational and evolutionary perspective on the role of representation in computer vision CVGIP: Image Understanding, 60(1):65-73, July 1994 (article)

pdf [BibTex]

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Reconstruction and purpose

Tarr, M. J., Black, M. J.

CVGIP: Image Understanding, 60(1):113-118, July 1994 (article)

pdf [BibTex]

Tarr, M. J., Black, M. J. Reconstruction and purpose CVGIP: Image Understanding, 60(1):113-118, July 1994 (article)

pdf [BibTex]

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The outlier process: Unifying line processes and robust statistics

Black, M., Rangarajan, A.

In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR’94, pages: 15-22, Seattle, WA, June 1994 (inproceedings)

pdf abstract [BibTex]

Black, M., Rangarajan, A. The outlier process: Unifying line processes and robust statistics In IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR’94, pages: 15-22, Seattle, WA, June 1994 (inproceedings)

pdf abstract [BibTex]