Kronecker-Markov Prior for Dynamic 3D Reconstruction

MannequinChallenge: Learning the Depths of Moving People by Watching Frozen People

We present a method for predicting dense depth in scenarios where both a monocular camera and people in the scene are freely moving (right). Existing methods for recovering depth for dynamic, non-rigid objects from monocular video impose strong assumptions on the objects' motion and may only recover sparse depth. In this paper, we take a data-driven approach and learn human depth priors from a new source of data: thousands of Internet videos of people imitating mannequins, i.e., freezing in diverse, natural poses, while a hand-held camera tours the scene (left). Because people are stationary, geometric constraints hold, thus training data can be generated using multi-view stereo reconstruction. At inference time, our method uses motion parallax cues from the static areas of the scenes to guide the depth prediction. We evaluate our method on real-world sequences of complex human actions captured by a moving hand-held camera, show improvement over state-of-the-art monocular depth prediction methods, and demonstrate various 3D effects produced using our predicted depth.

Reconstruct as Far as You Can: Consensus of Non-Rigid Reconstruction from Feasible Regions

Much progress has been made for non-rigid structure from motion (NRSfM) during the last two decades, which made it possible to provide reasonable solutions for synthetically-created benchmark data. In order to utilize these NRSfM techniques in more realistic situations, however, we are now facing two important problems that must be solved: First, general scenes contain complex deformations as well as multiple objects, which violates the usual assumptions of previous NRSfM proposals. Second, there are many unreconstructable regions in the video, either because of the discontinued tracks of 2D trajectories or those regions static towards the camera, which require careful manipulations. In this paper, we show that a consensus-based reconstruction framework can handle these issues effectively. Even though the entire scene is complex, its parts usually have simpler deformations, and even though there are some unreconstructable parts, they can be weeded out to reduce their harmful effect on the entire reconstruction. The main difficulty of this approach lies in identifying appropriate parts, however, it can be effectively avoided by sampling parts stochastically and then aggregate their reconstructions afterwards. Experimental results show that the proposed method renews the state-of-the-art for popular benchmark data under much harsher environments, i.e., narrow camera view ranges, and it can reconstruct video-based real-world data effectively for as many areas as it can without an elaborated user input.

A Benchmark and Evaluation of Non-Rigid Structure from Motion

Non-rigid structure from motion (nrsfm), is a long standing and central problem in computer vision and its solution is necessary for obtaining 3D information from multiple images when the scene is dynamic. A main issue regarding the further development of this important computer vision topic, is the lack of high quality data sets. We here address this issue by presenting a data set created for this purpose, which is made publicly available, and considerably larger than the previous state of the art. To validate the applicability of this data set, and provide an investigation into the state of the art of nrsfm, including potential directions forward, we here present a benchmark and a scrupulous evaluation using this data set. This benchmark evaluates 18 different methods with available code that reasonably spans the state of the art in sparse nrsfm. This new public data set and evaluation protocol will provide benchmark tools for further development in this challenging field.

Procrustean Regression: A Flexible Alignment-Based Framework for Nonrigid Structure Estimation

Non-rigid structure from motion (NRSfM) is a fundamental problem of computer vision. Recently, it has been shown that incorporating shape alignment in NRSfM can improve the performance significantly compared with the other algorithms, which do not consider shape alignment. However, realizing this idea was at a cost of a heavy, complicated process, which limits its usefulness and possible extensions. In this paper, we propose a novel regression framework for NRSfM, of which the variables (3D shapes) are regularized based on their aligned shapes. We show that this can be casted into an unconstrained problem or a problem with simple bound constraints, which can be efficiently solved by existing solvers. This framework can be easily integrated with numerous existing models and assumptions, such as orthographic or perspective camera models, occlusion, low-rank assumption, smooth deformations, and so on, which makes it more practical for various real situations. The experimental results show that the proposed method gives competitive result to the state-of-the-art methods for orthographic projection with much less time complexity and memory requirement, and outperforms the existing methods for perspective projection.