Papers for

3d animation teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Model tracks body points in 3D from regular photos

Dense4D: Pixel-Level 4D Human Correspondence

Abstract: Reconstructing human motion in 4D requires identifying the same surface points through articulation, deformation and changes in visibility. We introduce Dense4D, to our knowledge the first feed-forward model dedicated to dense 4D correspondence across the body, clothing and hair from a set of monocular RGB images, without a body template. Trained specifically for human geometry, Dense4D jointly processes person-centred crops with known image-to-crop transforms to predict Human Point Maps (HPMs) and depth for each image. An HPM assigns each person pixel the 3D position of its observed surface point at a common reference time. These maps support amodal correspondence: points hidden in the reference image can be localised from observations in other frames. Matching HPM coordinates across crops establishes correspondence without predicting camera poses or large scene displacements; per-image depth then lifts the matches into 3D tracks. Experiments on real people demonstrate substantially higher tracking accuracy and closer agreement with scanned surfaces than the evaluated baselines. Points from different frames assemble into coherent human geometry in the reference pose, providing visible evidence of consistent dense correspondence through articulation and clothing deformation. Additional qualitative results, videos, and an interactive viewer are available at https://alpguler.com/dense4d.

Thu 15 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Understanding how people move in 3D from normal video is hard because the same points on the body can look very different when the person moves, wears clothes, or parts are hidden. The authors created Dense4D, a model that looks at regular images of a person and figures out where body points are over time without needing a preset body model. It works by giving every pixel a 3D position relative to a fixed time, even if parts are hidden in some images. This helps create detailed, consistent tracks of the person’s body shape and motion, handling clothes and hair well.
Open → 2610.22325v1

Neural network speeds and improves 3D shape analysis and generation

NeuralSRNF: Neural Square Root Normal Fields for the Statistical Shape Analysis and Generation of Nonrigid 3D and 4D Objects

Abstract: We introduce NeuralSRNF, a novel framework for the statistical shape analysis and generation of genus-zero 3D and 4D objects that undergo nonrigid deformations. Traditional methods rely on complex and computationally expensive nonlinear elastic metrics that measure bending and stretching. Recent advances in elastic shape analysis achieve computational efficiency by mapping input 3D shapes to the space of Square Root Normal Fields (SRNFs) where the L2 metric approximates the partial elastic metric, significantly facilitating the process of computing geodesics and summary statistics. SRNFs, however, are not invertible, and the numerical algorithms used to map SRNFs back to the original space of surfaces remain computationally very expensive and often lead to approximate results. This paper addresses this fundamental SRNF inversion problem using a novel neural representation, termed NeuralSRNF. Unlike the commonly used numerical SRNF, NeuralSRNF is (1) continuous, and thus resolution-agnostic, enabling full functional shape analysis, (2) more accurate, and (3) computationally more efficient as it can compute inverse SRNF maps along a geodesic path in less than 3 s compared to over 10 min for the numerical SRNF. We demonstrate, using various datasets, the utility and efficiency of the proposed NeuralSRNF in multiple elastic 3D and 4D shape analysis tasks such as geodesic computation, deformation transfer, statistical summaries computation, and 3D shape generation. We show that it outperforms competing methods on most evaluated datasets and metrics by a wide margin in both accuracy and computational efficiency. The source code and additional results are available at https://awaisnizamani16.github.io/awais/NeuralSRNF/.

Wed 23 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Analyzing and creating 3D and 4D shapes that bend and move is hard and slow with traditional methods. The authors developed NeuralSRNF, a neural network that makes these tasks faster and more accurate by improving the way shapes are mathematically represented and converted back. This new method works well for shapes with complex deformations and helps perform shape comparisons, transformations, and generating new shapes efficiently. It also works across different resolutions and reduces processing time from over 10 minutes to under 3 seconds.
Open → 2609.27728v1