Daily Papers

Accurate hand pose estimation is vital in robotics, advancing dexterous manipulation in human-computer interaction. Toward this goal, this paper presents ReJSHand (which stands for Refined Joint and Skeleton Features), a cutting-edge network formulated for real-time hand pose estimation and mesh reconstruction. The proposed framework is designed to accurately predict 3D hand gestures under real-time constraints, which is essential for systems that demand agile and responsive hand motion tracking. The network's design prioritizes computational efficiency without compromising accuracy, a prerequisite for instantaneous robotic interactions. Specifically, ReJSHand comprises a 2D keypoint generator, a 3D keypoint generator, an expansion block, and a feature interaction block for meticulously reconstructing 3D hand poses from 2D imagery. In addition, the multi-head self-attention mechanism and a coordinate attention layer enhance feature representation, streamlining the creation of hand mesh vertices through sophisticated feature mapping and linear transformation. Regarding performance, comprehensive evaluations on the FreiHand dataset demonstrate ReJSHand's computational prowess. It achieves a frame rate of 72 frames per second while maintaining a PA-MPJPE (Position-Accurate Mean Per Joint Position Error) of 6.3 mm and a PA-MPVPE (Position-Accurate Mean Per Vertex Position Error) of 6.4 mm. Moreover, our model reaches scores of 0.756 for F@05 and 0.984 for F@15, surpassing modern pipelines and solidifying its position at the forefront of robotic hand pose estimators. To facilitate future studies, we provide our source code at ~https://github.com/daishipeng/ReJSHand.

Human pose estimation (HPE) in the top-view using fisheye cameras presents a promising and innovative application domain. However, the availability of datasets capturing this viewpoint is extremely limited, especially those with high-quality 2D and 3D keypoint annotations. Addressing this gap, we leverage the capabilities of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) technique to establish a comprehensive pipeline for generating human pose datasets from existing 2D and 3D datasets, specifically tailored for the top-view fisheye perspective. Through this pipeline, we create a novel dataset NToP570K (NeRF-powered Top-view human Pose dataset for fisheye cameras with over 570 thousand images), and conduct an extensive evaluation of its efficacy in enhancing neural networks for 2D and 3D top-view human pose estimation. A pretrained ViTPose-B model achieves an improvement in AP of 33.3 % on our validation set for 2D HPE after finetuning on our training set. A similarly finetuned HybrIK-Transformer model gains 53.7 mm reduction in PA-MPJPE for 3D HPE on the validation set.

Audio-driven single-image talking portrait generation plays a crucial role in virtual reality, digital human creation, and filmmaking. Existing approaches are generally categorized into keypoint-based and image-based methods. Keypoint-based methods effectively preserve character identity but struggle to capture fine facial details due to the fixed points limitation of the 3D Morphable Model. Moreover, traditional generative networks face challenges in establishing causality between audio and keypoints on limited datasets, resulting in low pose diversity. In contrast, image-based approaches produce high-quality portraits with diverse details using the diffusion network but incur identity distortion and expensive computational costs. In this work, we propose KDTalker, the first framework to combine unsupervised implicit 3D keypoint with a spatiotemporal diffusion model. Leveraging unsupervised implicit 3D keypoints, KDTalker adapts facial information densities, allowing the diffusion process to model diverse head poses and capture fine facial details flexibly. The custom-designed spatiotemporal attention mechanism ensures accurate lip synchronization, producing temporally consistent, high-quality animations while enhancing computational efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that KDTalker achieves state-of-the-art performance regarding lip synchronization accuracy, head pose diversity, and execution efficiency.Our codes are available at https://github.com/chaolongy/KDTalker.

We introduce RIPE, an innovative reinforcement learning-based framework for weakly-supervised training of a keypoint extractor that excels in both detection and description tasks. In contrast to conventional training regimes that depend heavily on artificial transformations, pre-generated models, or 3D data, RIPE requires only a binary label indicating whether paired images represent the same scene. This minimal supervision significantly expands the pool of training data, enabling the creation of a highly generalized and robust keypoint extractor. RIPE utilizes the encoder's intermediate layers for the description of the keypoints with a hyper-column approach to integrate information from different scales. Additionally, we propose an auxiliary loss to enhance the discriminative capability of the learned descriptors. Comprehensive evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that RIPE simplifies data preparation while achieving competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques, marking a significant advancement in robust keypoint extraction and description. To support further research, we have made our code publicly available at https://github.com/fraunhoferhhi/RIPE.