Synthesizing Images of Humans in Unseen Poses[paper]

Abstract

We address the computational problem of novel human pose synthesis. Given an image of a person and a desired pose, we produce a depiction of that person in that pose, retaining the appearance of both the person and background. We present a modular generative neural network that synthesizes unseen poses using training pairs of images and poses taken from human action videos. Our network separates a scene into different body part and background layers, moves body parts to new locations and refines their appearances, and composites the new foreground with a hole-filled background. These subtasks, implemented with separate modules, are trained jointly using only a single target image as a supervised label. We use an adversarial discriminator to force our network to synthesize realistic details conditioned on pose. We demonstrate image synthesis results on three action classes: golf, yoga/workouts and tennis, and show that our method produces accurate results within action classes as well as across action classes. Given a sequence of desired poses, we also produce coherent videos of actions.

Total Capture: A 3D Deformation Model for Tracking Faces, Hands, and Bodies[paper]

Abstract

We present a unified deformation model for the markerless capture of multiple scales of human movement, including facial expressions, body motion, and hand gestures. An initial model is generated by locally stitching together models of the individual parts of the human body, which we refer to as the “Frankenstein” model. This model enables the full expression of part movements, including face and hands by a single seamless model. Using a large-scale capture of people wearing everyday clothes, we optimize the Frankenstein model to create “Adam”. Adam is a calibrated model that shares the same skeleton hierarchy as the initial model but can express hair and clothing geometry, making it directly usable for fitting people as they normally appear in everyday life. Finally, we demonstrate the use of these models for total motion tracking, simultaneously capturing the large-scale body movements and the subtle face and hand motion of a social group of people.