Efficient Human-Contact Representation for Human-Scene Interaction

2026-08-10Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summary

The authors address the challenge of efficiently representing how humans interact with their surroundings in digital settings like virtual reality and robotics. They introduce 'sparse contact masks' that pick out only the most important contact details between a person and their environment, reducing unnecessary data. By using these masks, they create faster and more precise computer models that predict where a human touches a scene and help generate realistic scenes. Their tests on three datasets show their method beats existing models in accuracy and speed, running at least 12 times faster. This work helps make human-scene interaction models both quicker and better.

human-scene interactioncontact representationsparse contact masksdeep networkscomputation speed-upcontact predictionscene synthesisbenchmark datasetsmodel optimization
Authors
Nghia Vu, Tuong Do, Binh X. Nguyen, Erman Tjiputra, Anh Nguyen
Abstract
Human-scene interaction is an active research topic with several industrial applications in virtual reality, gaming, robotics, and surveillance. Despite significant progress in network architectures to improve the results or optimize models' parameters for fast inference speed, the efficient representation of contact between humans and their environments remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose a new efficient human-contact representation for human-scene interaction. Our primary contribution is the introduction of sparse contact masks that strategically select essential contact information, significantly reducing redundant data in high-dimensional inputs. Leveraging this efficient contact representation, we propose a suite of sparse operators to replace traditional dense operators within deep network layers for faster computation. Our approach not only enhances computational speed but also filters out non-essential contact data, thereby improving the precision of human-scene interaction models. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct intensive experiments across three public benchmark datasets, focusing on two critical tasks for human-scene interaction: contact prediction and scene synthesis. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art models in reconstruction accuracy and achieves a computation speed-up of at least 12 times over recent baselines.