Look Ma, no markers: holistic performance capture without the hassle

We tackle the problem of highly-accurate, holistic performance capture for the face, body and hands simultaneously. Motion-capture technologies used in film and game production typically focus only on face, body or hand capture independently, involve complex and expensive hardware and a high degree of manual intervention from skilled operators. While machine-learning-based approaches exist to overcome these problems, they usually only support a single camera, often operate on a single part of the body, do not produce precise world-space results, and rarely generalize outside specific contexts. In this work, we introduce the first technique for marker-free, high-quality reconstruction of the complete human body, including eyes and tongue, without requiring any calibration, manual intervention or custom hardware. Our approach produces stable world-space results from arbitrary camera rigs as well as supporting varied capture environments and clothing. We achieve this through a hybrid approach that leverages machine learning models trained exclusively on synthetic data and powerful parametric models of human shape and motion. We evaluate our method on a number of body, face and hand reconstruction benchmarks and demonstrate state-of-the-art results that generalize on diverse datasets.

Procedural Humans for Computer Vision

Recent work has shown the benefits of synthetic data for use in computer vision, with applications ranging from autonomous driving to face landmark detection and reconstruction. There are a number of benefits of using synthetic data from privacy preservation and bias elimination to quality and feasibility of annotation. Generating human-centered synthetic data is a particular challenge in terms of realism and domain-gap, though recent work has shown that effective machine learning models can be trained using synthetic face data alone. We show that this can be extended to include the full body by building on the pipeline of Wood et al. to generate synthetic images of humans in their entirety, with ground-truth annotations for computer vision applications. In this report we describe how we construct a parametric model of the face and body, including articulated hands; our rendering pipeline to generate realistic images of humans based on this body model; an approach for training DNNs to regress a dense set of landmarks covering the entire body; and a method for fitting our body model to dense landmarks predicted from multiple views.