Shu Nakamura

Shu Nakamura, Yasutomo Kawanishi, Shohei Nobuhara et al.

In this paper, we realize automatic visual recognition and direction estimation of pointing. We introduce the first neural pointing understanding method based on two key contributions. The first is the introduction of a first-of-its-kind large-scale dataset for pointing recognition and direction estimation, which we refer to as the DP Dataset. DP Dataset consists of more than 2 million frames of 33 people pointing in various styles annotated for each frame with pointing timings and 3D directions. The second is DeePoint, a novel deep network model for joint recognition and 3D direction estimation of pointing. DeePoint is a Transformer-based network which fully leverages the spatio-temporal coordination of the body parts, not just the hands. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of DeePoint. We believe DP Dataset and DeePoint will serve as a sound foundation for visual human intention understanding.

Shu Nakamura, Ryo Kawahara, Genki Kinoshita et al.

We introduce a novel 3D hand pose estimator that can accurately recover the shape and pose of people's hands in a room from afar, typically from fixed cameras at room corners, in extremely low-resolution and frequently occluded views. Our key idea is to fully leverage hand-body coordination, its temporal progression, and multiview observations. We achieve this with a novel Transformer-based model, in which hand and body configurations are modeled through correlations between their visual features expressed as per-view tokens, and their temporal coordination is exploited in an autoregressive manner. We introduce a novel dataset, which we refer to as REACH, Room-Environment dataset Annotated with Chest cameras for Hand pose estimation, to train and test our method. REACH is a first-of-its-kind large-scale hand pose dataset that captures accurate hand movements of 50 participants across a wide variety of daily activities. In order to avoid interfering with natural movements while annotating the hands with accurate shape and pose, we leverage concealed chest cameras. Through extensive experiments, including comparative studies with existing methods, we show that our model, REACH-Net, achieves highly accurate 3D hand pose estimation from afar. These results broaden the horizon of 3D hand pose estimation, especially towards "in-the-wild" continuous human behavior analysis.

Fabricio MaciÃ, Shu Nakamura

We analyze a simple one-hidden-layer neural network with ReLU activation functions and fixed biases, with one-dimensional input and output. We study both continuous and discrete versions of the model, and we rigorously prove the convergence of the learning process with the $L^2$ squared loss function and the gradient descent procedure. We also prove the spectral bias property for this learning process. Several conclusions of this analysis are discussed; in particular, regarding the structure and properties that activation functions should possess, as well as the relationships between the spectrum of certain operators and the learning process. Based on this, we also propose an alternative activation function, the full-wave rectified exponential function (FReX), and we discuss the convergence of the gradient descent with this alternative activation function.

Genki Kinoshita, Shu Nakamura, Ryo Kawahara et al.

Effective human behavior modeling requires a representation of the human body movement that capitalizes on its compositionality. We propose a hierarchical representation consisting of Action Atoms that capture the atomic joint movements and Action Motifs that are formed by their temporal compositions and encode similar body movements found across different overall human actions. We derive A4Mer, a nested latent Transformer to learn this hierarchical representation from human pose data in a fully self-supervised manner. A4Mer splits a 3D pose sequence into variable-length segments and represents each segment as a single latent token (Action Atoms). Through bottom-up representation learning, temporal patterns composed of these Action Atoms, which capture meaningful temporal spans of reusable, semantic segments of body movements, naturally emerge (Action Motifs). A4Mer achieves this with a unified pretext task of masked token prediction in their respective latent spaces. We also introduce Action Motif Dataset (AMD), a large-scale dataset of multi-view human behavior videos with full SMPL annotations. We introduce a novel use of cameras by mounting them on the feet to achieve their frame-wise annotations despite frequent and heavy body occlusions. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of A4Mer for extracting meaningful Action Motifs, which significantly benefit human behavior modeling tasks including action recognition, motion prediction, and motion interpolation.