VioPose: Violin Performance 4D Pose Estimation by Hierarchical Audiovisual Inference

Musicians delicately control their bodies to generate music. Sometimes, their motions are too subtle to be captured by the human eye. To analyze how they move to produce the music, we need to estimate precise 4D human pose (3D pose over time). However, current state-of-the-art (SoTA) visual pose estimation algorithms struggle to produce accurate monocular 4D poses because of occlusions, partial views, and human-object interactions. They are limited by the viewing angle, pixel density, and sampling rate of the cameras and fail to estimate fast and subtle movements, such as in the musical effect of vibrato. We leverage the direct causal relationship between the music produced and the human motions creating them to address these challenges. We propose VioPose: a novel multimodal network that hierarchically estimates dynamics. High-level features are cascaded to low-level features and integrated into Bayesian updates. Our architecture is shown to produce accurate pose sequences, facilitating precise motion analysis, and outperforms SoTA. As part of this work, we collected the largest and the most diverse calibrated violin-playing dataset, including video, sound, and 3D motion capture poses. Project page: is available at https://sj-yoo.info/viopose/.

AcTExplore: Active Tactile Exploration on Unknown Objects

Tactile exploration plays a crucial role in understanding object structures for fundamental robotics tasks such as grasping and manipulation. However, efficiently exploring such objects using tactile sensors is challenging, primarily due to the large-scale unknown environments and limited sensing coverage of these sensors. To this end, we present AcTExplore, an active tactile exploration method driven by reinforcement learning for object reconstruction at scales that automatically explores the object surfaces in a limited number of steps. Through sufficient exploration, our algorithm incrementally collects tactile data and reconstructs 3D shapes of the objects as well, which can serve as a representation for higher-level downstream tasks. Our method achieves an average of 95.97% IoU coverage on unseen YCB objects while just being trained on primitive shapes. Project Webpage: https://prg.cs.umd$.$edu/AcTExplore