Header logo is


2022


Reconstructing Expressive {3D} Humans from {RGB} Images
Reconstructing Expressive 3D Humans from RGB Images

Choutas, V.

ETH Zurich, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ETH Zurich, December 2022 (thesis)

Abstract
To interact with our environment, we need to adapt our body posture and grasp objects with our hands. During a conversation our facial expressions and hand gestures convey important non-verbal cues about our emotional state and intentions towards our fellow speakers. Thus, modeling and capturing 3D full-body shape and pose, hand articulation and facial expressions are necessary to create realistic human avatars for augmented and virtual reality. This is a complex task, due to the large number of degrees of freedom for articulation, body shape variance, occlusions from objects and self-occlusions from body parts, e.g. crossing our hands, and subject appearance. The community has thus far relied on expensive and cumbersome equipment, such as multi-view cameras or motion capture markers, to capture the 3D human body. While this approach is effective, it is limited to a small number of subjects and indoor scenarios. Using monocular RGB cameras would greatly simplify the avatar creation process, thanks to their lower cost and ease of use. These advantages come at a price though, since RGB capture methods need to deal with occlusions, perspective ambiguity and large variations in subject appearance, in addition to all the challenges posed by full-body capture. In an attempt to simplify the problem, researchers generally adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy, estimating the body, face and hands with distinct methods using part-specific datasets and benchmarks. However, the hands and face constrain the body and vice-versa, e.g. the position of the wrist depends on the elbow, shoulder, etc.; the divide-and-conquer approach can not utilize this constraint. In this thesis, we aim to reconstruct the full 3D human body, using only readily accessible monocular RGB images. In a first step, we introduce a parametric 3D body model, called SMPL-X, that can represent full-body shape and pose, hand articulation and facial expression. Next, we present an iterative optimization method, named SMPLify-X, that fits SMPL-X to 2D image keypoints. While SMPLify-X can produce plausible results if the 2D observations are sufficiently reliable, it is slow and susceptible to initialization. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ExPose, a neural network regressor, that predicts SMPL-X parameters from an image using body-driven attention, i.e. by zooming in on the hands and face, after predicting the body. From the zoomed-in part images, dedicated part networks predict the hand and face parameters. ExPose combines the independent body, hand, and face estimates by trusting them equally. This approach though does not fully exploit the correlation between parts and fails in the presence of challenges such as occlusion or motion blur. Thus, we need a better mechanism to aggregate information from the full body and part images. PIXIE uses neural networks called moderators that learn to fuse information from these two image sets before predicting the final part parameters. Overall, the addition of the hands and face leads to noticeably more natural and expressive reconstructions. Creating high fidelity avatars from RGB images requires accurate estimation of 3D body shape. Although existing methods are effective at predicting body pose, they struggle with body shape. We identify the lack of proper training data as the cause. To overcome this obstacle, we propose to collect internet images from fashion models websites, together with anthropometric measurements. At the same time, we ask human annotators to rate images and meshes according to a pre-defined set of linguistic attributes. We then define mappings between measurements, linguistic shape attributes and 3D body shape. Equipped with these mappings, we train a neural network regressor, SHAPY, that predicts accurate 3D body shapes from a single RGB image. We observe that existing 3D shape benchmarks lack subject variety and/or ground-truth shape. Thus, we introduce a new benchmark, Human Bodies in the Wild (HBW), which contains images of humans and their corresponding 3D ground-truth body shape. SHAPY shows how we can overcome the lack of in-the-wild images with 3D shape annotations through easy-to-obtain anthropometric measurements and linguistic shape attributes. Regressors that estimate 3D model parameters are robust and accurate, but often fail to tightly fit the observations. Optimization-based approaches tightly fit the data, by minimizing an energy function composed of a data term that penalizes deviations from the observations and priors that encode our knowledge of the problem. Finding the balance between these terms and implementing a performant version of the solver is a time-consuming and non-trivial task. Machine-learned continuous optimizers combine the benefits of both regression and optimization approaches. They learn the priors directly from data, avoiding the need for hand-crafted heuristics and loss term balancing, and benefit from optimized neural network frameworks for fast inference. Inspired from the classic Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, we propose a neural optimizer that outperforms classic optimization, regression and hybrid optimization-regression approaches. Our proposed update rule uses a weighted combination of gradient descent and a network-predicted update. To show the versatility of the proposed method, we apply it on three other problems, namely full body estimation from (i) 2D keypoints, (ii) head and hand location from a head-mounted device and (iii) face tracking from dense 2D landmarks. Our method can easily be applied to new model fitting problems and offers a competitive alternative to well-tuned traditional model fitting pipelines, both in terms of accuracy and speed. To summarize, we propose a new and richer representation of the human body, SMPL-X, that is able to jointly model the 3D human body pose and shape, facial expressions and hand articulation. We propose methods, SMPLify-X, ExPose and PIXIE that estimate SMPL-X parameters from monocular RGB images, progressively improving the accuracy and realism of the predictions. To further improve reconstruction fidelity, we demonstrate how we can use easy-to-collect internet data and human annotations to overcome the lack of 3D shape data and train a model, SHAPY, that predicts accurate 3D body shape from a single RGB image. Finally, we propose a flexible learnable update rule for parametric human model fitting that outperforms both classic optimization and neural network approaches. This approach is easily applicable to a variety of problems, unlocking new applications in AR/VR scenarios.

ps

pdf [BibTex]

2022


pdf [BibTex]


no image
Causality, causal digital twins, and their applications

Schölkopf, B.

Machine Learning for Science: Bridging Data-Driven and Mechanistic Modelling (Dagstuhl Seminar 22382), (Editors: Berens, Philipp and Cranmer, Kyle and Lawrence, Neil D. and von Luxburg, Ulrike and Montgomery, Jessica), September 2022 (talk)

ei

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

link (url) DOI [BibTex]


no image
Does deliberate prospection help students set better goals?

Jähnichen, S., Weber, F., Prentice, M., Lieder, F.

KogWis 2022 "Understanding Minds", September 2022 (poster) Accepted

re

link (url) [BibTex]

link (url) [BibTex]

2021


no image
Physically Plausible Tracking & Reconstruction of Dynamic Objects

Strecke, M., Stückler, J.

KIT Science Week Scientific Conference & DGR-Days 2021, October 2021 (talk)

ev

[BibTex]

2021


[BibTex]


Promoting metacognitive learning through systematic reflection
Promoting metacognitive learning through systematic reflection

Frederic Becker, , Lieder, F.

The first edition of Life Improvement Science Conference, June 2021 (poster)

Abstract
Human decision-making is sometimes systematically biased toward suboptimal decisions. For example, people often make short-sighted choices because they don't give enough weight to the long-term consequences of their actions. Previous studies showed that it is possible to overcome such biases by teaching people a more rational decision strategy through instruction, demonstrations, or practice with feedback. The benefits of these approaches tend to be limited to situations that are very similar to those used during the training. One way to overcome this limitation is to create general tools and strategies that people can use to improve their decision-making in any situation. Here we propose one such approach, namely directing people to systematically reflect on how they make their decisions. In systematic reflection, past experience is re-evaluated with the intention to learn. In this study, we investigate how reflection affects how people learn to plan and whether reflective learning can help people to discover more far-sighted planning strategies. In our experiment participants solve a series of 30 planning problems where the immediate rewards are smaller and therefore less important than long-term rewards. Building on Wolfbauer et al. (2020), the experimental group is guided by four reflection prompts asking the participant to describe their planning strategy, the strategy's performance, and his or her emotional response, insights, and intention to change their strategy. The control group practices planning without reflection prompts. Our pilot data suggest that systematic reflection helps people to more rapidly discover adaptive planning strategies. Our findings suggest that reflection is useful not only for helping people learn what to do in a specific situation but also for helping people learn how to think about what to do. In future work, we will compare the effects of different types of reflection on the subsequent changes in people's decision strategies. Developing apps that prompt people to reflect on their decisions may be a promising approach to accelerating cognitive growth and promoting lifelong learning.

re

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


Improving Human Decision-Making by Discovering Efficient Strategies for Hierarchical Planning
Improving Human Decision-Making by Discovering Efficient Strategies for Hierarchical Planning

Heindrich, L., Consul, S., Stojcheski, J., Lieder, F.

Tübingen, Germany, The first edition of Life Improvement Science Conference, June 2021 (talk) Accepted

Abstract
The discovery of decision strategies is an essential part of creating effective cognitive tutors that teach planning and decision-making skills to humans. In the context of bounded rationality, this requires weighing the benefits of different planning operations compared to their computational costs. For small decision problems, it has already been shown that near-optimal decision strategies can be discovered automatically and that the discovered strategies can be taught to humans to increase their performance. Unfortunately, these near-optimal strategy discovery algorithms have not been able to scale well to larger problems due to their computational complexity. In this talk, we will present recent work at the Rationality Enhancement Group to overcome the computational bottleneck of existing strategy discovery algorithms. Our approach makes use of the hierarchical structure of human behavior by decomposing sequential decision problems into two sub-problems: setting a goal and planning how to achieve it. An additional metacontroller component is introduced to switch the current goal when it becomes beneficial. The hierarchical decomposition enables us to discover near-optimal strategies for human planning in larger and more complex tasks than previously possible. We then show in online experiments that teaching the discovered strategies to humans improves their performance in complex sequential decision-making tasks.

re

Project Page [BibTex]

Project Page [BibTex]

2020


no image
Voltage dependent interfacial magnetism in multilayer systems

Nacke, R.

Universität Stuttgart, Stuttgart, December 2020 (thesis)

mms

[BibTex]

2020


[BibTex]


Towards Hybrid Active and Passive Compliant Mechanisms in Legged Robots
Towards Hybrid Active and Passive Compliant Mechanisms in Legged Robots

Milad Shafiee Ashtiani, A. A. S., Badri-Sproewitz, A.

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE, October 2020 (poster) Accepted

dlg

Abstract Poster [BibTex]

Abstract Poster [BibTex]


VP above or below? A new perspective on the story of the virtual point
VP above or below? A new perspective on the story of the virtual point

Drama, Ö., Badri-Spröwitz, A.

Dynamic Walking, May 2020 (poster)

Abstract
The spring inverted pendulum model with an extended trunk (TSLIP) is widely used to investigate the postural stability in bipedal locomotion [1, 2]. The challenge of the model is to define a hip torque that generates feasible gait patterns while stabilizing the floating trunk. The virtual point (VP) method is proposed as a simplified solution, where the hip torque is coupled to the passive compliant leg force via a virtual point. This geometric coupling is based on the assumption that the instantaneous ground reaction forces of the stance phase (GRF) intersect at a single virtual point.

dlg

Poster Abstract link (url) [BibTex]

Poster Abstract link (url) [BibTex]


Viscous Damping in Legged Locomotion
Viscous Damping in Legged Locomotion

Mo, A., Izzi, F., Haeufle, D. F. B., Badri-Spröwitz, A.

Dynamic Walking, May 2020 (poster)

Abstract
Damping likely plays an essential role in legged animal locomotion, but remains an insufficiently understood mechanism. Intrinsic damping muscle forces can potentially add to the joint torque output during unexpected impacts, stabilise movements, convert the system’s energy, and reject unexpected perturbations.

dlg

Abstract Poster link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

Abstract Poster link (url) Project Page [BibTex]


How Quadrupeds Benefit from Lower Leg Passive Elasticity
How Quadrupeds Benefit from Lower Leg Passive Elasticity

Ruppert, F., Badri-Spröwitz, A.

Dynamic Walking, May 2020 (poster)

Abstract
Recently developed and fully actuated, legged robots start showing exciting locomotion capabilities, but rely heavily on high-power actuators, high-frequency sensors, and complex locomotion controllers. The engineering solutions implemented in these legged robots are much different compared to animals. Vertebrate animals share magnitudes slower neurocontrol signal velocities [1] compared to their robot counterparts. Also, animals feature a plethora of cascaded and underactuated passive elastic structures [2].

dlg

Abstract Poster link (url) Project Page [BibTex]


Potential for elastic soft tissue deformation and mechanosensory function within the lumbosacral spinal canal of birds
Potential for elastic soft tissue deformation and mechanosensory function within the lumbosacral spinal canal of birds

Kamska, V., Daley, M., Badri-Spröwitz, A.

Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting (SICB Annual Meeting 2020), January 2020 (poster)

dlg

DOI [BibTex]

DOI [BibTex]

2019


no image
Multivariate coupling estimation between continuous signals and point processes

Safavi, S., Logothetis, N., Besserve, M.

Neural Information Processing Systems 2019 - Workshop on Learning with Temporal Point Processes, December 2019 (talk)

ei

Talk video link (url) [BibTex]

2019


Talk video link (url) [BibTex]


no image
Perception of temporal dependencies in autoregressive motion

Meding, K., Schölkopf, B., Wichmann, F. A.

Perception, 48(2-suppl):141, 42nd European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), August 2019 (poster)

ei

link (url) [BibTex]

link (url) [BibTex]


no image
Phenomenal Causality and Sensory Realism

Bruijns, S. A., Meding, K., Schölkopf, B., Wichmann, F. A.

Perception, 48(2-suppl):141, 42nd European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), August 2019 (poster)

ei

link (url) [BibTex]

link (url) [BibTex]


no image
Neural mass modeling of the Ponto-Geniculo-Occipital wave and its neuromodulation

Shao, K., Logothetis, N., Besserve, M.

28th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting (CNS*2019), July 2019 (poster)

ei

DOI [BibTex]

DOI [BibTex]


no image
Demo Abstract: Fast Feedback Control and Coordination with Mode Changes for Wireless Cyber-Physical Systems

(Best Demo Award)

Mager, F., Baumann, D., Jacob, R., Thiele, L., Trimpe, S., Zimmerling, M.

Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), pages: 340-341, 18th ACM/IEEE Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), April 2019 (poster)

ics

arXiv PDF DOI [BibTex]

arXiv PDF DOI [BibTex]

2018


Impact of Trunk Orientation  for Dynamic Bipedal Locomotion
Impact of Trunk Orientation for Dynamic Bipedal Locomotion

Drama, Ö.

Dynamic Walking Conference, May 2018 (talk)

Abstract
Impact of trunk orientation for dynamic bipedal locomotion My research revolves around investigating the functional demands of bipedal running, with focus on stabilizing trunk orientation. When we think about postural stability, there are two critical questions we need to answer: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions to achieve and maintain trunk stability? I am concentrating on how morphology affects control strategies in achieving trunk stability. In particular, I denote the trunk pitch as the predominant morphology parameter and explore the requirements it imposes on a chosen control strategy. To analyze this, I use a spring loaded inverted pendulum model extended with a rigid trunk, which is actuated by a hip motor. The challenge for the controller design here is to have a single hip actuator to achieve two coupled tasks of moving the legs to generate motion and stabilizing the trunk. I enforce orthograde and pronograde postures and aim to identify the effect of these trunk orientations on the hip torque and ground reaction profiles for different control strategies.

dlg

Impact of trunk orientation for dynamic bipedal locomotion [DW 2018] link (url) [BibTex]


no image
Poster Abstract: Toward Fast Closed-loop Control over Multi-hop Low-power Wireless Networks

Mager, F., Baumann, D., Trimpe, S., Zimmerling, M.

Proceedings of the 17th ACM/IEEE Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), pages: 158-159, Porto, Portugal, April 2018 (poster)

ics

DOI Project Page [BibTex]

DOI Project Page [BibTex]


no image
Representation of sensory uncertainty in macaque visual cortex

Goris, R., Henaff, O., Meding, K.

Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) 2018, March 2018 (poster)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


no image
Generalized phase locking analysis of electrophysiology data

Safavi, S., Panagiotaropoulos, T., Kapoor, V., Logothetis, N. K., Besserve, M.

7th AREADNE Conference on Research in Encoding and Decoding of Neural Ensembles, 2018 (poster)

ei

link (url) [BibTex]

link (url) [BibTex]


no image
Photorealistic Video Super Resolution

Pérez-Pellitero, E., Sajjadi, M. S. M., Hirsch, M., Schölkopf, B.

Workshop and Challenge on Perceptual Image Restoration and Manipulation (PIRM) at the 15th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018 (poster)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


no image
Retinal image quality of the human eye across the visual field

Meding, K., Hirsch, M., Wichmann, F. A.

14th Biannual Conference of the German Society for Cognitive Science (KOGWIS 2018), 2018 (poster)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]

2017


no image
Improving performance of linear field generation with multi-coil setup by optimizing coils position

Aghaeifar, A., Loktyushin, A., Eschelbach, M., Scheffler, K.

Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine, 30(Supplement 1):S259, 34th Annual Scientific Meeting of the European Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and Biology (ESMRMB), October 2017 (poster)

ei

link (url) DOI [BibTex]

2017


link (url) DOI [BibTex]


no image
Estimating B0 inhomogeneities with projection FID navigator readouts

Loktyushin, A., Ehses, P., Schölkopf, B., Scheffler, K.

25th Annual Meeting and Exhibition of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), April 2017 (poster)

ei

link (url) [BibTex]

link (url) [BibTex]


no image
Image Quality Improvement by Applying Retrospective Motion Correction on Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping and R2*

Feng, X., Loktyushin, A., Deistung, A., Reichenbach, J.

25th Annual Meeting and Exhibition of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), April 2017 (poster)

ei

link (url) [BibTex]

link (url) [BibTex]


no image
Generalized phase locking analysis of electrophysiology data

Safavi, S., Panagiotaropoulos, T., Kapoor, V., Logothetis, N. K., Besserve, M.

ESI Systems Neuroscience Conference (ESI-SyNC 2017): Principles of Structural and Functional Connectivity, 2017 (poster)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]

2016


no image
Autofocusing-based correction of B0 fluctuation-induced ghosting

Loktyushin, A., Ehses, P., Schölkopf, B., Scheffler, K.

24th Annual Meeting and Exhibition of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), May 2016 (poster)

ei

link (url) [BibTex]

2016


link (url) [BibTex]


no image
Distinct adaptation to abrupt and gradual torque perturbations with a multi-joint exoskeleton robot

Oh, Y., Sutanto, G., Mistry, M., Schweighofer, N., Schaal, S.

Abstracts of Neural Control of Movement Conference (NCM 2016), Montego Bay, Jamaica, April 2016 (poster)

am

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


no image
PGO wave-triggered functional MRI: mapping the networks underlying synaptic consolidation

Logothetis, N. K., Murayama, Y., Ramirez-Villegas, J. F., Besserve, M., Evrard, H.

47th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (Neuroscience), 2016 (poster)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


no image
Statistical source separation of rhythmic LFP patterns during sharp wave ripples in the macaque hippocampus

Ramirez-Villegas, J. F., Logothetis, N. K., Besserve, M.

47th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (Neuroscience), 2016 (poster)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


no image
Hippocampal neural events predict ongoing brain-wide BOLD activity

Besserve, M., Logothetis, N. K.

47th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (Neuroscience), 2016 (poster)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]

2015


no image
Diversity of sharp wave-ripples in the CA1 of the macaque hippocampus and their brain wide signatures

Ramirez-Villegas, J. F., Logothetis, N. K., Besserve, M.

45th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (Neuroscience 2015), October 2015 (poster)

ei

link (url) [BibTex]

2015


link (url) [BibTex]


no image
Causal Inference for Empirical Time Series Based on the Postulate of Independence of Cause and Mechanism

Besserve, M.

53rd Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, September 2015 (talk)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


no image
Retrospective rigid motion correction of undersampled MRI data

Loktyushin, A., Babayeva, M., Gallichan, D., Krueger, G., Scheffler, K., Kober, T.

23rd Annual Meeting and Exhibition of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, ISMRM, June 2015 (poster)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


no image
Improving Quantitative Susceptibility and R2* Mapping by Applying Retrospective Motion Correction

Feng, X., Loktyushin, A., Deistung, A., Reichenbach, J. R.

23rd Annual Meeting and Exhibition of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, ISMRM, June 2015 (poster)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


no image
Independence of cause and mechanism in brain networks

Besserve, M.

DALI workshop on Networks: Processes and Causality, April 2015 (talk)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


no image
Policy Search for Imitation Learning

Doerr, A.

University of Stuttgart, January 2015 (thesis)

am ics

link (url) Project Page [BibTex]

link (url) Project Page [BibTex]


no image
Increasing the sensitivity of Kepler to Earth-like exoplanets

Foreman-Mackey, D., Hogg, D., Schölkopf, B., Wang, D.

Workshop: 225th American Astronomical Society Meeting 2015 , pages: 105.01D, 2015 (poster)

ei

Web link (url) [BibTex]

Web link (url) [BibTex]


no image
Information-Theoretic Implications of Classical and Quantum Causal Structures

Chaves, R., Majenz, C., Luft, L., Maciel, T., Janzing, D., Schölkopf, B., Gross, D.

18th Conference on Quantum Information Processing (QIP), 2015 (talk)

ei

Web link (url) [BibTex]

Web link (url) [BibTex]


no image
Calibrating the pixel-level Kepler imaging data with a causal data-driven model

Wang, D., Foreman-Mackey, D., Hogg, D., Schölkopf, B.

Workshop: 225th American Astronomical Society Meeting 2015 , pages: 258.08, 2015 (poster)

ei

Web link (url) [BibTex]

Web link (url) [BibTex]


no image
The search for single exoplanet transits in the Kepler light curves

Foreman-Mackey, D., Hogg, D. W., Schölkopf, B.

IAU General Assembly, 22, pages: 2258352, 2015 (talk)

ei

link (url) [BibTex]

link (url) [BibTex]


no image
Disparity estimation from a generative light field model

Köhler, R., Schölkopf, B., Hirsch, M.

IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2015), Workshop on Inverse Rendering, 2015, Note: This work has been presented as a poster and is not included in the workshop proceedings. (poster)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


no image
Dynamical source analysis of hippocampal sharp-wave ripple episodes

Ramirez-Villegas, J. F., Logothetis, N. K., Besserve, M.

Bernstein Conference, 2014 (poster)

ei

DOI [BibTex]

DOI [BibTex]


no image
Unsupervised identification of neural events in local field potentials

Besserve, M., Schölkopf, B., Logothetis, N. K.

44th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (Neuroscience), 2014 (talk)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


no image
FID-guided retrospective motion correction based on autofocusing

Babayeva, M., Loktyushin, A., Kober, T., Granziera, C., Nickisch, H., Gruetter, R., Krueger, G.

Joint Annual Meeting ISMRM-ESMRMB, Milano, Italy, 2014 (poster)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


no image
Quantifying statistical dependency

Besserve, M.

Research Network on Learning Systems Summer School, 2014 (talk)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]


no image
Cluster analysis of sharp-wave ripple field potential signatures in the macaque hippocampus

Ramirez-Villegas, J. F., Logothetis, N. K., Besserve, M.

Computational and Systems Neuroscience Meeting (COSYNE), 2014 (poster)

ei

[BibTex]

[BibTex]