To look human, digital full-body avatars need to have soft tissue deformations like those of real people. We learn a model of soft-tissue deformations from examples using a high-resolution 4D capture system and a method that accurately registers a template mesh to sequences of 3D scans. Using over 40,000 scans of ten subjects, we learn how soft tissue motion causes mesh triangles to deform relative to a base 3D body model. Our Dyna model uses a low-dimensional linear subspace to approximate soft-tissue deformation and relates the subspace coefficients to the changing pose of the body. Dyna uses a second-order auto-regressive model that predicts soft-tissue deformations based on previous deformations, the velocity and acceleration of the body, and the angular velocities and accelerations of the limbs. Dyna also models how deformations vary with a person’s body mass index (BMI), producing different deformations for people with different shapes. Dyna realistically represents the dynamics of soft tissue for previously unseen subjects and motions. We provide tools for animators to modify the deformations and apply them to new stylized characters.

The analysis and understanding of human movement is central to many applications such as sports science, medical diagnosis and movie production. The ability to automatically monitor human activity in security sensitive areas such as airports, lobbies or borders is of great practical importance. Furthermore, automatic pose estimation from images leverages the processing and understanding of massive digital libraries available on the Internet. We build upon a model based approach where the human shape is modelled with a surface mesh and the motion is parametrized by a kinematic chain. We then seek for the pose of the model that best explains the available observations coming from different sensors. In a first scenario, we consider a calibrated mult-iview setup in an indoor studio. To obtain very accurate results, we propose a novel tracker that combines information coming from video and a small set of Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). We do so by locally optimizing a joint energy consisting of a term that measures the likelihood of the video data and a term for the IMU data. This is the first work to successfully combine video and IMUs information for full body pose estimation. When compared to commercial marker based systems the proposed solution is more cost efficient and less intrusive for the user. In a second scenario, we relax the assumption of an indoor studio and we tackle outdoor scenes with background clutter, illumination changes, large recording volumes and difficult motions of people interacting with objects. Again, we combine information from video and IMUs. Here we employ a particle based optimization approach that allows us to be more robust to tracking failures. To satisfy the orientation constraints imposed by the IMUs, we derive an analytic Inverse Kinematics (IK) procedure to sample from the manifold of valid poses. The generated hypothesis come from a lower dimensional manifold and therefore the computational cost can be reduced. Experiments on challenging sequences suggest the proposed tracker can be applied to capture in outdoor scenarios. Furthermore, the proposed IK sampling procedure can be used to integrate any kind of constraints derived from the environment. Finally, we consider the most challenging possible scenario: pose estimation of monocular images. Here, we argue that estimating the pose to the degree of accuracy as in an engineered environment is too ambitious with the current technology. Therefore, we propose to extract meaningful semantic information about the pose directly from image features in a discriminative fashion. In particular, we introduce posebits which are semantic pose descriptors about the geometric relationships between parts in the body. The experiments show that the intermediate step of inferring posebits from images can improve pose estimation from monocular imagery. Furthermore, posebits can be very useful as input feature for many computer vision algorithms.

We advocate the inference of qualitative information about 3D human pose, called posebits, from images. Posebits represent boolean geometric relationships between body parts (e.g., left-leg in front of right-leg or hands close to each other). The advantages of posebits as a mid-level representation are 1) for many tasks of interest, such qualitative pose information may be sufficient (e.g. \, semantic image retrieval), 2) it is relatively easy to annotate large image corpora with posebits, as it simply requires answers to yes/no questions; and 3) they help resolve challenging pose ambiguities and therefore facilitate the difficult talk of image-based 3D pose estimation. We introduce posebits, a posebit database, a method for selecting useful posebits for pose estimation and a structural SVM model for posebit inference. Experiments show the use of posebits for semantic image retrieval and for improving 3D pose estimation.