16 February 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
This paper addresses the challenge of novel view synthesis for a human performer from a very sparse set of camera views. Some recent works have shown that learning implicit neural representations of 3D scenes achieves remarkable view synthesis quality given dense input views. However, the representation learning will be ill-posed if the views are highly sparse. To solve this ill-posed problem, our key idea is to integrate observations over video frames. To this end, we propose Neural Body, a new human body representation which assumes that the learned neural representations at different frames share the same set of latent codes anchored to a deformable mesh, so that the observations across frames can be naturally integrated. The deformable mesh also provides geometric guidance for the network to learn 3D representations more efficiently. Furthermore, we combine Neural Body with implicit surface models to improve the learned geometry. To evaluate our approach, we perform experiments on both synthetic and real-world data, which show that our approach outperforms prior works by a large margin on novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction. We also demonstrate the capability of our approach to reconstruct a moving person from a monocular video on the People-Snapshot dataset.
17 January 2024 in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
This paper addresses the challenge of reconstructing an animatable human model from a multi-view video. Some recent works have proposed to decompose a non-rigidly deforming scene into a canonical neural radiance field and a set of deformation fields that map observation-space points to the canonical space, thereby enabling them to learn the dynamic scene from images. However, they represent the deformation field as translational vector field or SE(3) field, which makes the optimization highly under-constrained. Moreover, these representations cannot be explicitly controlled by input motions. Instead, we introduce blend weight fields to produce the deformation fields. Based on the skeleton-driven deformation, blend weight fields are used with 3D human skeletons to generate observation-to-canonical and canonical-to-observation correspondences. Since 3D human skeletons are more observable, they can regularize the learning of deformation fields. Moreover, the blend weight fields can be combined with input skeletal motions to generate new deformation fields to animate the human model. To improve the quality of human modeling, we further represent the human geometry as a signed distance field in the canonical space. Additionally, a neural point displacement field is introduced to enhance the capability of the blend weight field on modeling detailed human motions. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms recent human modeling methods. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/animatable nerf/ .
29 April 2021 in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
In this paper, we propose a novel system named Disp R-CNN for 3D object detection from stereo images. Many recent works solve this problem by first recovering point clouds with disparity estimation and then apply a 3D detector. The disparity map is computed for the entire image, which is costly and fails to leverage category-specific prior. In contrast, we design an instance disparity estimation network (iDispNet) that predicts disparity only for pixels on objects of interest and learns a category-specific shape prior for more accurate disparity estimation. To address the challenge from scarcity of disparity annotation in training, we propose to use a statistical shape model to generate dense disparity pseudo-ground-truth without the need of LiDAR point clouds, which makes our system more widely applicable. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that, when LiDAR ground-truth is not used at training time, Disp R-CNN outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods based on stereo input by 20% in terms of average precision for all categories. The code and pseudo-ground-truth data are available at the project page: https://github.com/zju3dv/disprcnn.
1 July 2026 in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
The generation of anchor-style product promotion videos presents promising opportunities in e-commerce, advertising, and consumer engagement. Despite advancements in pose-guided human video generation, creating product promotion videos remains challenging. In addressing this challenge, we identify the integration of human-object interactions (HOI) into pose-guided human video generation as a core issue. To this end, we introduce AnchorCrafter, a novel diffusion-based system designed to generate 2D videos featuring a target human and a customized object, achieving high visual fidelity and controllable interactions. Specifically, we propose two key innovations: the HOI-appearance perception, which enhances object appearance recognition from arbitrary multi-view perspectives and disentangles object and human appearance, and the HOI-motion injection, which enables complex human-object interactions by overcoming challenges in object trajectory conditioning and inter-occlusion management. Extensive experiments show that our system improves object appearance preservation by 7.5%, and achieves the best video quality compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. It also outperforms existing approaches in maintaining human motion consistency and high-quality video generation.
5 December 2023 in ACM Transactions on Graphics
This paper addresses the challenging task of reconstructing the poses of multiple individuals engaged in close interactions, captured by multiple calibrated cameras. The difficulty arises from the noisy or false 2D keypoint detections due to inter-person occlusion, the heavy ambiguity in associating keypoints to individuals due to the close interactions, and the scarcity of training data as collecting and annotating motion data in crowded scenes is resource-intensive. We introduce a novel system to address these challenges. Our system integrates a learning-based pose estimation component and its corresponding training and inference strategies. The pose estimation component takes multi-view 2D keypoint heatmaps as input and reconstructs the pose of each individual using a 3D conditional volumetric network. As the network doesn't need images as input, we can leverage known camera parameters from test scenes and a large quantity of existing motion capture data to synthesize massive training data that mimics the real data distribution in test scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly surpasses previous approaches in terms of pose accuracy and is generalizable across various camera setups and population sizes. The code is available on our project page: https://github.com/zju3dv/CloseMoCap.