Abstract:Fusing Events and RGB images for object detection leverages the robustness of Event cameras in adverse environments and the rich semantic information provided by RGB cameras. However, two critical mismatches: low-latency Events \textit{vs.}~high-latency RGB frames; temporally sparse labels in training \textit{vs.}~continuous flow in inference, significantly hinder the high-frequency fusion-based object detection. To address these challenges, we propose the \textbf{F}requency-\textbf{A}daptive Low-Latency \textbf{O}bject \textbf{D}etector (FAOD). FAOD aligns low-frequency RGB frames with high-frequency Events through an Align Module, which reinforces cross-modal style and spatial proximity to address the Event-RGB Mismatch. We further propose a training strategy, Time Shift, which enforces the module to align the prediction from temporally shifted Event-RGB pairs and their original representation, that is, consistent with Event-aligned annotations. This strategy enables the network to use high-frequency Event data as the primary reference while treating low-frequency RGB images as supplementary information, retaining the low-latency nature of the Event stream toward high-frequency detection. Furthermore, we observe that these corrected Event-RGB pairs demonstrate better generalization from low training frequency to higher inference frequencies compared to using Event data alone. Extensive experiments on the PKU-DAVIS-SOD and DSEC-Detection datasets demonstrate that our FAOD achieves SOTA performance. Specifically, in the PKU-DAVIS-SOD Dataset, FAOD achieves 9.8 points improvement in terms of the mAP in fully paired Event-RGB data with only a quarter of the parameters compared to SODFormer, and even maintains robust performance (only a 3 points drop in mAP) under 80$\times$ Event-RGB frequency mismatch.
Abstract:Keypoint detection and tracking in traditional image frames are often compromised by image quality issues such as motion blur and extreme lighting conditions. Event cameras offer potential solutions to these challenges by virtue of their high temporal resolution and high dynamic range. However, they have limited performance in practical applications due to their inherent noise in event data. This paper advocates fusing the complementary information from image frames and event streams to achieve more robust keypoint detection and tracking. Specifically, we propose a novel keypoint detection network that fuses the textural and structural information from image frames with the high-temporal-resolution motion information from event streams, namely FE-DeTr. The network leverages a temporal response consistency for supervision, ensuring stable and efficient keypoint detection. Moreover, we use a spatio-temporal nearest-neighbor search strategy for robust keypoint tracking. Extensive experiments are conducted on a new dataset featuring both image frames and event data captured under extreme conditions. The experimental results confirm the superior performance of our method over both existing frame-based and event-based methods.
Abstract:Audio-Driven Face Animation is an eagerly anticipated technique for applications such as VR/AR, games, and movie making. With the rapid development of 3D engines, there is an increasing demand for driving 3D faces with audio. However, currently available 3D face animation datasets are either scale-limited or quality-unsatisfied, which hampers further developments of audio-driven 3D face animation. To address this challenge, we propose MMFace4D, a large-scale multi-modal 4D (3D sequence) face dataset consisting of 431 identities, 35,904 sequences, and 3.9 million frames. MMFace4D has three appealing characteristics: 1) highly diversified subjects and corpus, 2) synchronized audio and 3D mesh sequence with high-resolution face details, and 3) low storage cost with a new efficient compression algorithm on 3D mesh sequences. These characteristics enable the training of high-fidelity, expressive, and generalizable face animation models. Upon MMFace4D, we construct a challenging benchmark of audio-driven 3D face animation with a strong baseline, which enables non-autoregressive generation with fast inference speed and outperforms the state-of-the-art autoregressive method. The whole benchmark will be released.
Abstract:We propose a real time deep learning framework for video-based facial expression capture. Our process uses a high-end facial capture pipeline based on FACEGOOD to capture facial expression. We train a convolutional neural network to produce high-quality continuous blendshape weight output from video training. Since this facial capture is fully automated, our system can drastically reduce the amount of labor involved in the development of modern narrative-driven video games or films involving realistic digital doubles of actors and potentially hours of animated dialogue per character. We demonstrate compelling animation inference in challenging areas such as eyes and lips.