Human-Aware 3D Scene Generation with Spatially-constrained Diffusion Models

Generating 3D scenes from human motion sequences supports numerous applications, including virtual reality and architectural design. However, previous auto-regression-based human-aware 3D scene generation methods have struggled to accurately capture the joint distribution of multiple objects and input humans, often resulting in overlapping object generation in the same space. To address this limitation, we explore the potential of diffusion models that simultaneously consider all input humans and the floor plan to generate plausible 3D scenes. Our approach not only satisfies all input human interactions but also adheres to spatial constraints with the floor plan. Furthermore, we introduce two spatial collision guidance mechanisms: human-object collision avoidance and object-room boundary constraints. These mechanisms help avoid generating scenes that conflict with human motions while respecting layout constraints. To enhance the diversity and accuracy of human-guided scene generation, we have developed an automated pipeline that improves the variety and plausibility of human-object interactions in the existing 3D FRONT HUMAN dataset. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework can generate more natural and plausible 3D scenes with precise human-scene interactions, while significantly reducing human-object collisions compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. Our code and data will be made publicly available upon publication of this work.

Generating Human Interaction Motions in Scenes with Text Control

We present TeSMo, a method for text-controlled scene-aware motion generation based on denoising diffusion models. Previous text-to-motion methods focus on characters in isolation without considering scenes due to the limited availability of datasets that include motion, text descriptions, and interactive scenes. Our approach begins with pre-training a scene-agnostic text-to-motion diffusion model, emphasizing goal-reaching constraints on large-scale motion-capture datasets. We then enhance this model with a scene-aware component, fine-tuned using data augmented with detailed scene information, including ground plane and object shapes. To facilitate training, we embed annotated navigation and interaction motions within scenes. The proposed method produces realistic and diverse human-object interactions, such as navigation and sitting, in different scenes with various object shapes, orientations, initial body positions, and poses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses prior techniques in terms of the plausibility of human-scene interactions, as well as the realism and variety of the generated motions. Code will be released upon publication of this work at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/tesmo.

DECO: Dense Estimation of 3D Human-Scene Contact In The Wild

Understanding how humans use physical contact to interact with the world is key to enabling human-centric artificial intelligence. While inferring 3D contact is crucial for modeling realistic and physically-plausible human-object interactions, existing methods either focus on 2D, consider body joints rather than the surface, use coarse 3D body regions, or do not generalize to in-the-wild images. In contrast, we focus on inferring dense, 3D contact between the full body surface and objects in arbitrary images. To achieve this, we first collect DAMON, a new dataset containing dense vertex-level contact annotations paired with RGB images containing complex human-object and human-scene contact. Second, we train DECO, a novel 3D contact detector that uses both body-part-driven and scene-context-driven attention to estimate vertex-level contact on the SMPL body. DECO builds on the insight that human observers recognize contact by reasoning about the contacting body parts, their proximity to scene objects, and the surrounding scene context. We perform extensive evaluations of our detector on DAMON as well as on the RICH and BEHAVE datasets. We significantly outperform existing SOTA methods across all benchmarks. We also show qualitatively that DECO generalizes well to diverse and challenging real-world human interactions in natural images. The code, data, and models are available at https://deco.is.tue.mpg.de.

POCO: 3D Pose and Shape Estimation with Confidence

The regression of 3D Human Pose and Shape (HPS) from an image is becoming increasingly accurate. This makes the results useful for downstream tasks like human action recognition or 3D graphics. Yet, no regressor is perfect, and accuracy can be affected by ambiguous image evidence or by poses and appearance that are unseen during training. Most current HPS regressors, however, do not report the confidence of their outputs, meaning that downstream tasks cannot differentiate accurate estimates from inaccurate ones. To address this, we develop POCO, a novel framework for training HPS regressors to estimate not only a 3D human body, but also their confidence, in a single feed-forward pass. Specifically, POCO estimates both the 3D body pose and a per-sample variance. The key idea is to introduce a Dual Conditioning Strategy (DCS) for regressing uncertainty that is highly correlated to pose reconstruction quality. The POCO framework can be applied to any HPS regressor and here we evaluate it by modifying HMR, PARE, and CLIFF. In all cases, training the network to reason about uncertainty helps it learn to more accurately estimate 3D pose. While this was not our goal, the improvement is modest but consistent. Our main motivation is to provide uncertainty estimates for downstream tasks; we demonstrate this in two ways: (1) We use the confidence estimates to bootstrap HPS training. Given unlabelled image data, we take the confident estimates of a POCO-trained regressor as pseudo ground truth. Retraining with this automatically-curated data improves accuracy. (2) We exploit uncertainty in video pose estimation by automatically identifying uncertain frames (e.g. due to occlusion) and inpainting these from confident frames. Code and models will be available for research at https://poco.is.tue.mpg.de.

TADA! Text to Animatable Digital Avatars

We introduce TADA, a simple-yet-effective approach that takes textual descriptions and produces expressive 3D avatars with high-quality geometry and lifelike textures, that can be animated and rendered with traditional graphics pipelines. Existing text-based character generation methods are limited in terms of geometry and texture quality, and cannot be realistically animated due to inconsistent alignment between the geometry and the texture, particularly in the face region. To overcome these limitations, TADA leverages the synergy of a 2D diffusion model and an animatable parametric body model. Specifically, we derive an optimizable high-resolution body model from SMPL-X with 3D displacements and a texture map, and use hierarchical rendering with score distillation sampling (SDS) to create high-quality, detailed, holistic 3D avatars from text. To ensure alignment between the geometry and texture, we render normals and RGB images of the generated character and exploit their latent embeddings in the SDS training process. We further introduce various expression parameters to deform the generated character during training, ensuring that the semantics of our generated character remain consistent with the original SMPL-X model, resulting in an animatable character. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that TADA significantly surpasses existing approaches on both qualitative and quantitative measures. TADA enables creation of large-scale digital character assets that are ready for animation and rendering, while also being easily editable through natural language. The code will be public for research purposes.

TeCH: Text-guided Reconstruction of Lifelike Clothed Humans

Despite recent research advancements in reconstructing clothed humans from a single image, accurately restoring the "unseen regions" with high-level details remains an unsolved challenge that lacks attention. Existing methods often generate overly smooth back-side surfaces with a blurry texture. But how to effectively capture all visual attributes of an individual from a single image, which are sufficient to reconstruct unseen areas (e.g., the back view)? Motivated by the power of foundation models, TeCH reconstructs the 3D human by leveraging 1) descriptive text prompts (e.g., garments, colors, hairstyles) which are automatically generated via a garment parsing model and Visual Question Answering (VQA), 2) a personalized fine-tuned Text-to-Image diffusion model (T2I) which learns the "indescribable" appearance. To represent high-resolution 3D clothed humans at an affordable cost, we propose a hybrid 3D representation based on DMTet, which consists of an explicit body shape grid and an implicit distance field. Guided by the descriptive prompts + personalized T2I diffusion model, the geometry and texture of the 3D humans are optimized through multi-view Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and reconstruction losses based on the original observation. TeCH produces high-fidelity 3D clothed humans with consistent & delicate texture, and detailed full-body geometry. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that TeCH outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy and rendering quality. The code will be publicly available for research purposes at https://huangyangyi.github.io/TeCH

Real-time Monocular Full-body Capture in World Space via Sequential Proxy-to-Motion Learning

Learning-based approaches to monocular motion capture have recently shown promising results by learning to regress in a data-driven manner. However, due to the challenges in data collection and network designs, it remains challenging for existing solutions to achieve real-time full-body capture while being accurate in world space. In this work, we contribute a sequential proxy-to-motion learning scheme together with a proxy dataset of 2D skeleton sequences and 3D rotational motions in world space. Such proxy data enables us to build a learning-based network with accurate full-body supervision while also mitigating the generalization issues. For more accurate and physically plausible predictions, a contact-aware neural motion descent module is proposed in our network so that it can be aware of foot-ground contact and motion misalignment with the proxy observations. Additionally, we share the body-hand context information in our network for more compatible wrist poses recovery with the full-body model. With the proposed learning-based solution, we demonstrate the first real-time monocular full-body capture system with plausible foot-ground contact in world space. More video results can be found at our project page: https://liuyebin.com/proxycap.

High-Fidelity Clothed Avatar Reconstruction from a Single Image

This paper presents a framework for efficient 3D clothed avatar reconstruction. By combining the advantages of the high accuracy of optimization-based methods and the efficiency of learning-based methods, we propose a coarse-to-fine way to realize a high-fidelity clothed avatar reconstruction (CAR) from a single image. At the first stage, we use an implicit model to learn the general shape in the canonical space of a person in a learning-based way, and at the second stage, we refine the surface detail by estimating the non-rigid deformation in the posed space in an optimization way. A hyper-network is utilized to generate a good initialization so that the convergence o f the optimization process is greatly accelerated. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that the proposed CAR successfully produces high-fidelity avatars for arbitrarily clothed humans in real scenes.

SLOPER4D: A Scene-Aware Dataset for Global 4D Human Pose Estimation in Urban Environments

We present SLOPER4D, a novel scene-aware dataset collected in large urban environments to facilitate the research of global human pose estimation (GHPE) with human-scene interaction in the wild. Employing a head-mounted device integrated with a LiDAR and camera, we record 12 human subjects' activities over 10 diverse urban scenes from an egocentric view. Frame-wise annotations for 2D key points, 3D pose parameters, and global translations are provided, together with reconstructed scene point clouds. To obtain accurate 3D ground truth in such large dynamic scenes, we propose a joint optimization method to fit local SMPL meshes to the scene and fine-tune the camera calibration during dynamic motions frame by frame, resulting in plausible and scene-natural 3D human poses. Eventually, SLOPER4D consists of 15 sequences of human motions, each of which has a trajectory length of more than 200 meters (up to 1,300 meters) and covers an area of more than 2,000 $m^2$ (up to 13,000 $m^2$), including more than 100K LiDAR frames, 300k video frames, and 500K IMU-based motion frames. With SLOPER4D, we provide a detailed and thorough analysis of two critical tasks, including camera-based 3D HPE and LiDAR-based 3D HPE in urban environments, and benchmark a new task, GHPE. The in-depth analysis demonstrates SLOPER4D poses significant challenges to existing methods and produces great research opportunities. The dataset and code are released at \url{http://www.lidarhumanmotion.net/sloper4d/}

MIME: Human-Aware 3D Scene Generation

Generating realistic 3D worlds occupied by moving humans has many applications in games, architecture, and synthetic data creation. But generating such scenes is expensive and labor intensive. Recent work generates human poses and motions given a 3D scene. Here, we take the opposite approach and generate 3D indoor scenes given 3D human motion. Such motions can come from archival motion capture or from IMU sensors worn on the body, effectively turning human movement in a "scanner" of the 3D world. Intuitively, human movement indicates the free-space in a room and human contact indicates surfaces or objects that support activities such as sitting, lying or touching. We propose MIME (Mining Interaction and Movement to infer 3D Environments), which is a generative model of indoor scenes that produces furniture layouts that are consistent with the human movement. MIME uses an auto-regressive transformer architecture that takes the already generated objects in the scene as well as the human motion as input, and outputs the next plausible object. To train MIME, we build a dataset by populating the 3D FRONT scene dataset with 3D humans. Our experiments show that MIME produces more diverse and plausible 3D scenes than a recent generative scene method that does not know about human movement. Code and data will be available for research at https://mime.is.tue.mpg.de.