Grégory Rogez

Laura Bravo-Sánchez, Matthieu Armando, Romain Brégier et al.

Recovering 3D human pose and shape from a single image remains a cornerstone of human-centric vision, yet most methods assume adult subjects and optimize each person independently. These assumptions fail in real-world, all-age scenes, where body proportions and depth must be resolved jointly. We introduce Anny-Fit, a multi-person, camera-space optimization framework for all-age 3D human mesh recovery (HMR). Unlike existing per-person fitting methods, Anny-Fit jointly optimizes all individuals directly in the camera coordinate system, enforcing global spatial consistency. At the core of our approach is the use of multiple forms of expert knowledge -- including metric depth maps, instance segmentation, 2D keypoints, and, VLM-derived semantic attributes such as age and gender -- each obtained from dedicated off-the-shelf networks. These complementary signals jointly guide the optimization, constraining the depth-scale ambiguity characteristic of all-age scenes. Across diverse datasets, Anny-Fit consistently improves 2D reprojection accuracy (+13 to 16), relative depth ordering (+6 to 7), 3D estimation error (-9 to -29) and shape estimation (+25 to +82), producing more coherent scenes. Finally, we show that VLM-based semantic knowledge can be distilled into an HMR model via the pseudo-ground-truth annotations produced by Anny-Fit on training data, enabling it to learn semantically meaningful shape parameters while improving HMR performance. Our approach bridges adult-only and all-age modeling by enabling zero-shot adaptation of adult-trained HMR pipelines to the full age spectrum without retraining. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/naver/anny-fit.

Fabien Baradel, Romain Brégier, Thibault Groueix et al.

Training state-of-the-art models for human pose estimation in videos requires datasets with annotations that are really hard and expensive to obtain. Although transformers have been recently utilized for body pose sequence modeling, related methods rely on pseudo-ground truth to augment the currently limited training data available for learning such models. In this paper, we introduce PoseBERT, a transformer module that is fully trained on 3D Motion Capture (MoCap) data via masked modeling. It is simple, generic and versatile, as it can be plugged on top of any image-based model to transform it in a video-based model leveraging temporal information. We showcase variants of PoseBERT with different inputs varying from 3D skeleton keypoints to rotations of a 3D parametric model for either the full body (SMPL) or just the hands (MANO). Since PoseBERT training is task agnostic, the model can be applied to several tasks such as pose refinement, future pose prediction or motion completion without finetuning. Our experimental results validate that adding PoseBERT on top of various state-of-the-art pose estimation methods consistently improves their performances, while its low computational cost allows us to use it in a real-time demo for smoothly animating a robotic hand via a webcam. Test code and models are available at https://github.com/naver/posebert.

Thomas Lucas, Fabien Baradel, Philippe Weinzaepfel et al.

We address the problem of action-conditioned generation of human motion sequences. Existing work falls into two categories: forecast models conditioned on observed past motions, or generative models conditioned on action labels and duration only. In contrast, we generate motion conditioned on observations of arbitrary length, including none. To solve this generalized problem, we propose PoseGPT, an auto-regressive transformer-based approach which internally compresses human motion into quantized latent sequences. An auto-encoder first maps human motion to latent index sequences in a discrete space, and vice-versa. Inspired by the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT), we propose to train a GPT-like model for next-index prediction in that space; this allows PoseGPT to output distributions on possible futures, with or without conditioning on past motion. The discrete and compressed nature of the latent space allows the GPT-like model to focus on long-range signal, as it removes low-level redundancy in the input signal. Predicting discrete indices also alleviates the common pitfall of predicting averaged poses, a typical failure case when regressing continuous values, as the average of discrete targets is not a target itself. Our experimental results show that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on HumanAct12, a standard but small scale dataset, as well as on BABEL, a recent large scale MoCap dataset, and on GRAB, a human-object interactions dataset.

Ginger Delmas, Philippe Weinzaepfel, Francesc Moreno-Noguer et al.

Automatically producing instructions to modify one's posture could open the door to endless applications, such as personalized coaching and in-home physical therapy. Tackling the reverse problem (i.e., refining a 3D pose based on some natural language feedback) could help for assisted 3D character animation or robot teaching, for instance. Although a few recent works explore the connections between natural language and 3D human pose, none focus on describing 3D body pose differences. In this paper, we tackle the problem of correcting 3D human poses with natural language. To this end, we introduce the PoseFix dataset, which consists of several thousand paired 3D poses and their corresponding text feedback, that describe how the source pose needs to be modified to obtain the target pose. We demonstrate the potential of this dataset on two tasks: (1) text-based pose editing, that aims at generating corrected 3D body poses given a query pose and a text modifier; and (2) correctional text generation, where instructions are generated based on the differences between two body poses.

Ginger Delmas, Philippe Weinzaepfel, Thomas Lucas et al.

Natural language plays a critical role in many computer vision applications, such as image captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval, to provide fine-grained semantic information. Unfortunately, while human pose is key to human understanding, current 3D human pose datasets lack detailed language descriptions. To address this issue, we have introduced the PoseScript dataset. This dataset pairs more than six thousand 3D human poses from AMASS with rich human-annotated descriptions of the body parts and their spatial relationships. Additionally, to increase the size of the dataset to a scale that is compatible with data-hungry learning algorithms, we have proposed an elaborate captioning process that generates automatic synthetic descriptions in natural language from given 3D keypoints. This process extracts low-level pose information, known as "posecodes", using a set of simple but generic rules on the 3D keypoints. These posecodes are then combined into higher level textual descriptions using syntactic rules. With automatic annotations, the amount of available data significantly scales up (100k), making it possible to effectively pretrain deep models for finetuning on human captions. To showcase the potential of annotated poses, we present three multi-modal learning tasks that utilize the PoseScript dataset. Firstly, we develop a pipeline that maps 3D poses and textual descriptions into a joint embedding space, allowing for cross-modal retrieval of relevant poses from large-scale datasets. Secondly, we establish a baseline for a text-conditioned model generating 3D poses. Thirdly, we present a learned process for generating pose descriptions. These applications demonstrate the versatility and usefulness of annotated poses in various tasks and pave the way for future research in the field.

Ginger Delmas, Philippe Weinzaepfel, Francesc Moreno-Noguer et al.

Aligning multiple modalities in a latent space, such as images and texts, has shown to produce powerful semantic visual representations, fueling tasks like image captioning, text-to-image generation, or image grounding. In the context of human-centric vision, albeit CLIP-like representations encode most standard human poses relatively well (such as standing or sitting), they lack sufficient acuteness to discern detailed or uncommon ones. Actually, while 3D human poses have been often associated with images (e.g. to perform pose estimation or pose-conditioned image generation), or more recently with text (e.g. for text-to-pose generation), they have seldom been paired with both. In this work, we combine 3D poses, person's pictures and textual pose descriptions to produce an enhanced 3D-, visual- and semantic-aware human pose representation. We introduce a new transformer-based model, trained in a retrieval fashion, which can take as input any combination of the aforementioned modalities. When composing modalities, it outperforms a standard multi-modal alignment retrieval model, making it possible to sort out partial information (e.g. image with the lower body occluded). We showcase the potential of such an embroidered pose representation for (1) SMPL regression from image with optional text cue; and (2) on the task of fine-grained instruction generation, which consists in generating a text that describes how to move from one 3D pose to another (as a fitness coach). Unlike prior works, our model can take any kind of input (image and/or pose) without retraining.

Matthieu Armando, Salma Galaaoui, Fabien Baradel et al.

Human perception and understanding is a major domain of computer vision which, like many other vision subdomains recently, stands to gain from the use of large models pre-trained on large datasets. We hypothesize that the most common pre-training strategy of relying on general purpose, object-centric image datasets such as ImageNet, is limited by an important domain shift. On the other hand, collecting domain-specific ground truth such as 2D or 3D labels does not scale well. Therefore, we propose a pre-training approach based on self-supervised learning that works on human-centric data using only images. Our method uses pairs of images of humans: the first is partially masked and the model is trained to reconstruct the masked parts given the visible ones and a second image. It relies on both stereoscopic (cross-view) pairs, and temporal (cross-pose) pairs taken from videos, in order to learn priors about 3D as well as human motion. We pre-train a model for body-centric tasks and one for hand-centric tasks. With a generic transformer architecture, these models outperform existing self-supervised pre-training methods on a wide set of human-centric downstream tasks, and obtain state-of-the-art performance for instance when fine-tuning for model-based and model-free human mesh recovery.

Romain Brégier, Guénolé Fiche, Laura Bravo-Sánchez et al.

Parametric body models are central to many human-centric tasks, yet existing models often rely on costly 3D scans and learned shape spaces that are proprietary and demographically narrow. We introduce Anny, a simple, fully differentiable, and scan-free human body model grounded in anthropometric knowledge from the MakeHuman community. Anny defines a continuous, interpretable shape space, where phenotype parameters (e.g. gender, age, height, weight) control blendshapes spanning a wide range of human forms -- across ages (from infants to elders), body types, and proportions. Calibrated using WHO population statistics, it provides realistic and demographically grounded human shape variation within a single unified model. Thanks to its openness and semantic control, Anny serves as a versatile foundation for 3D human modeling -- supporting millimeter-accurate scan fitting, controlled synthetic data generation, and Human Mesh Recovery (HMR). We further introduce Anny-One, a collection of 800k photorealistic humans generated with Anny, showing that despite its simplicity, HMR models trained with Anny can match the performance of those trained with scan-based body models, while remaining interpretable and broadly representative. The Anny body model and its code are released under the Apache 2.0 license, making Anny an accessible foundation for human-centric 3D modeling.

Pau de Jorge, Adel Bibi, Riccardo Volpi et al.

Recently, Wong et al. showed that adversarial training with single-step FGSM leads to a characteristic failure mode named Catastrophic Overfitting (CO), in which a model becomes suddenly vulnerable to multi-step attacks. Experimentally they showed that simply adding a random perturbation prior to FGSM (RS-FGSM) could prevent CO. However, Andriushchenko and Flammarion observed that RS-FGSM still leads to CO for larger perturbations, and proposed a computationally expensive regularizer (GradAlign) to avoid it. In this work, we methodically revisit the role of noise and clipping in single-step adversarial training. Contrary to previous intuitions, we find that using a stronger noise around the clean sample combined with \textit{not clipping} is highly effective in avoiding CO for large perturbation radii. We then propose Noise-FGSM (N-FGSM) that, while providing the benefits of single-step adversarial training, does not suffer from CO. Empirical analyses on a large suite of experiments show that N-FGSM is able to match or surpass the performance of previous state-of-the-art GradAlign, while achieving 3x speed-up. Code can be found in https://github.com/pdejorge/N-FGSM

Fabien Baradel, Matthieu Armando, Salma Galaaoui et al.

We present Multi-HMR, a strong sigle-shot model for multi-person 3D human mesh recovery from a single RGB image. Predictions encompass the whole body, i.e., including hands and facial expressions, using the SMPL-X parametric model and 3D location in the camera coordinate system. Our model detects people by predicting coarse 2D heatmaps of person locations, using features produced by a standard Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone. It then predicts their whole-body pose, shape and 3D location using a new cross-attention module called the Human Prediction Head (HPH), with one query attending to the entire set of features for each detected person. As direct prediction of fine-grained hands and facial poses in a single shot, i.e., without relying on explicit crops around body parts, is hard to learn from existing data, we introduce CUFFS, the Close-Up Frames of Full-Body Subjects dataset, containing humans close to the camera with diverse hand poses. We show that incorporating it into the training data further enhances predictions, particularly for hands. Multi-HMR also optionally accounts for camera intrinsics, if available, by encoding camera ray directions for each image token. This simple design achieves strong performance on whole-body and body-only benchmarks simultaneously: a ViT-S backbone on $448{\times}448$ images already yields a fast and competitive model, while larger models and higher resolutions obtain state-of-the-art results.

Anilkumar Swamy, Vincent Leroy, Philippe Weinzaepfel et al.

Hand-object 3D reconstruction has become increasingly important for applications in human-robot interaction and immersive AR/VR experiences. A common approach for object-agnostic hand-object reconstruction from RGB sequences involves a two-stage pipeline: hand-object 3D tracking followed by multi-view 3D reconstruction. However, existing methods rely on keypoint detection techniques, such as Structure from Motion (SfM) and hand-keypoint optimization, which struggle with diverse object geometries, weak textures, and mutual hand-object occlusions, limiting scalability and generalization. As a key enabler to generic and seamless, non-intrusive applicability, we propose in this work a robust, keypoint detector-free approach to estimating hand-object 3D transformations from monocular motion video/images. We further integrate this with a multi-view reconstruction pipeline to accurately recover hand-object 3D shape. Our method, named HOSt3R, is unconstrained, does not rely on pre-scanned object templates or camera intrinsics, and reaches state-of-the-art performance for the tasks of object-agnostic hand-object 3D transformation and shape estimation on the SHOWMe benchmark. We also experiment on sequences from the HO3D dataset, demonstrating generalization to unseen object categories.

Fabien Baradel, Thibault Groueix, Philippe Weinzaepfel et al.

Training state-of-the-art models for human body pose and shape recovery from images or videos requires datasets with corresponding annotations that are really hard and expensive to obtain. Our goal in this paper is to study whether poses from 3D Motion Capture (MoCap) data can be used to improve image-based and video-based human mesh recovery methods. We find that fine-tune image-based models with synthetic renderings from MoCap data can increase their performance, by providing them with a wider variety of poses, textures and backgrounds. In fact, we show that simply fine-tuning the batch normalization layers of the model is enough to achieve large gains. We further study the use of MoCap data for video, and introduce PoseBERT, a transformer module that directly regresses the pose parameters and is trained via masked modeling. It is simple, generic and can be plugged on top of any state-of-the-art image-based model in order to transform it in a video-based model leveraging temporal information. Our experimental results show that the proposed approaches reach state-of-the-art performance on various datasets including 3DPW, MPI-INF-3DHP, MuPoTS-3D, MCB and AIST. Test code and models will be available soon.

Riccardo Volpi, Diane Larlus, Grégory Rogez

Most standard learning approaches lead to fragile models which are prone to drift when sequentially trained on samples of a different nature - the well-known "catastrophic forgetting" issue. In particular, when a model consecutively learns from different visual domains, it tends to forget the past domains in favor of the most recent ones. In this context, we show that one way to learn models that are inherently more robust against forgetting is domain randomization - for vision tasks, randomizing the current domain's distribution with heavy image manipulations. Building on this result, we devise a meta-learning strategy where a regularizer explicitly penalizes any loss associated with transferring the model from the current domain to different "auxiliary" meta-domains, while also easing adaptation to them. Such meta-domains are also generated through randomized image manipulations. We empirically demonstrate in a variety of experiments - spanning from classification to semantic segmentation - that our approach results in models that are less prone to catastrophic forgetting when transferred to new domains.

Vincent Leroy, Philippe Weinzaepfel, Romain Brégier et al.

Predicting 3D human pose from images has seen great recent improvements. Novel approaches that can even predict both pose and shape from a single input image have been introduced, often relying on a parametric model of the human body such as SMPL. While qualitative results for such methods are often shown for images captured in-the-wild, a proper benchmark in such conditions is still missing, as it is cumbersome to obtain ground-truth 3D poses elsewhere than in a motion capture room. This paper presents a pipeline to easily produce and validate such a dataset with accurate ground-truth, with which we benchmark recent 3D human pose estimation methods in-the-wild. We make use of the recently introduced Mannequin Challenge dataset which contains in-the-wild videos of people frozen in action like statues and leverage the fact that people are static and the camera moving to accurately fit the SMPL model on the sequences. A total of 24,428 frames with registered body models are then selected from 567 scenes at almost no cost, using only online RGB videos. We benchmark state-of-the-art SMPL-based human pose estimation methods on this dataset. Our results highlight that challenges remain, in particular for difficult poses or for scenes where the persons are partially truncated or occluded.

Philippe Weinzaepfel, Romain Brégier, Hadrien Combaluzier et al.

We introduce DOPE, the first method to detect and estimate whole-body 3D human poses, including bodies, hands and faces, in the wild. Achieving this level of details is key for a number of applications that require understanding the interactions of the people with each other or with the environment. The main challenge is the lack of in-the-wild data with labeled whole-body 3D poses. In previous work, training data has been annotated or generated for simpler tasks focusing on bodies, hands or faces separately. In this work, we propose to take advantage of these datasets to train independent experts for each part, namely a body, a hand and a face expert, and distill their knowledge into a single deep network designed for whole-body 2D-3D pose detection. In practice, given a training image with partial or no annotation, each part expert detects its subset of keypoints in 2D and 3D and the resulting estimations are combined to obtain whole-body pseudo ground-truth poses. A distillation loss encourages the whole-body predictions to mimic the experts' outputs. Our results show that this approach significantly outperforms the same whole-body model trained without distillation while staying close to the performance of the experts. Importantly, DOPE is computationally less demanding than the ensemble of experts and can achieve real-time performance. Test code and models are available at https://europe.naverlabs.com/research/computer-vision/dope.

Anil Armagan, Guillermo Garcia-Hernando, Seungryul Baek et al.

We study how well different types of approaches generalise in the task of 3D hand pose estimation under single hand scenarios and hand-object interaction. We show that the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods can drop, and that they fail mostly on poses absent from the training set. Unfortunately, since the space of hand poses is highly dimensional, it is inherently not feasible to cover the whole space densely, despite recent efforts in collecting large-scale training datasets. This sampling problem is even more severe when hands are interacting with objects and/or inputs are RGB rather than depth images, as RGB images also vary with lighting conditions and colors. To address these issues, we designed a public challenge (HANDS'19) to evaluate the abilities of current 3D hand pose estimators (HPEs) to interpolate and extrapolate the poses of a training set. More exactly, HANDS'19 is designed (a) to evaluate the influence of both depth and color modalities on 3D hand pose estimation, under the presence or absence of objects; (b) to assess the generalisation abilities w.r.t. four main axes: shapes, articulations, viewpoints, and objects; (c) to explore the use of a synthetic hand model to fill the gaps of current datasets. Through the challenge, the overall accuracy has dramatically improved over the baseline, especially on extrapolation tasks, from 27mm to 13mm mean joint error. Our analyses highlight the impacts of: Data pre-processing, ensemble approaches, the use of a parametric 3D hand model (MANO), and different HPE methods/backbones.

Philippe Weinzaepfel, Grégory Rogez

Recent methods for video action recognition have reached outstanding performances on existing benchmarks. However, they tend to leverage context such as scenes or objects instead of focusing on understanding the human action itself. For instance, a tennis field leads to the prediction playing tennis irrespectively of the actions performed in the video. In contrast, humans have a more complete understanding of actions and can recognize them without context. The best example of out-of-context actions are mimes, that people can typically recognize despite missing relevant objects and scenes. In this paper, we propose to benchmark action recognition methods in such absence of context and introduce a novel dataset, Mimetics, consisting of mimed actions for a subset of 50 classes from the Kinetics benchmark. Our experiments show that (a) state-of-the-art 3D convolutional neural networks obtain disappointing results on such videos, highlighting the lack of true understanding of the human actions and (b) models leveraging body language via human pose are less prone to context biases. In particular, we show that applying a shallow neural network with a single temporal convolution over body pose features transferred to the action recognition problem performs surprisingly well compared to 3D action recognition methods.

Grégory Rogez, Cordelia Schmid

This paper addresses the problem of 3D human pose estimation in the wild. A significant challenge is the lack of training data, i.e., 2D images of humans annotated with 3D poses. Such data is necessary to train state-of-the-art CNN architectures. Here, we propose a solution to generate a large set of photorealistic synthetic images of humans with 3D pose annotations. We introduce an image-based synthesis engine that artificially augments a dataset of real images with 2D human pose annotations using 3D motion capture data. Given a candidate 3D pose, our algorithm selects for each joint an image whose 2D pose locally matches the projected 3D pose. The selected images are then combined to generate a new synthetic image by stitching local image patches in a kinematically constrained manner. The resulting images are used to train an end-to-end CNN for full-body 3D pose estimation. We cluster the training data into a large number of pose classes and tackle pose estimation as a $K$-way classification problem. Such an approach is viable only with large training sets such as ours. Our method outperforms most of the published works in terms of 3D pose estimation in controlled environments (Human3.6M) and shows promising results for real-world images (LSP). This demonstrates that CNNs trained on artificial images generalize well to real images. Compared to data generated from more classical rendering engines, our synthetic images do not require any domain adaptation or fine-tuning stage.

Nicolas Chesneau, Grégory Rogez, Karteek Alahari et al.

In this paper, we propose a new framework for action localization that tracks people in videos and extracts full-body human tubes, i.e., spatio-temporal regions localizing actions, even in the case of occlusions or truncations. This is achieved by training a novel human part detector that scores visible parts while regressing full-body bounding boxes. The core of our method is a convolutional neural network which learns part proposals specific to certain body parts. These are then combined to detect people robustly in each frame. Our tracking algorithm connects the image detections temporally to extract full-body human tubes. We apply our new tube extraction method on the problem of human action localization, on the popular JHMDB dataset, and a very recent challenging dataset DALY (Daily Action Localization in YouTube), showing state-of-the-art results.

Grégory Rogez, Cordelia Schmid

This paper addresses the problem of 3D human pose estimation in the wild. A significant challenge is the lack of training data, i.e., 2D images of humans annotated with 3D poses. Such data is necessary to train state-of-the-art CNN architectures. Here, we propose a solution to generate a large set of photorealistic synthetic images of humans with 3D pose annotations. We introduce an image-based synthesis engine that artificially augments a dataset of real images with 2D human pose annotations using 3D Motion Capture (MoCap) data. Given a candidate 3D pose our algorithm selects for each joint an image whose 2D pose locally matches the projected 3D pose. The selected images are then combined to generate a new synthetic image by stitching local image patches in a kinematically constrained manner. The resulting images are used to train an end-to-end CNN for full-body 3D pose estimation. We cluster the training data into a large number of pose classes and tackle pose estimation as a K-way classification problem. Such an approach is viable only with large training sets such as ours. Our method outperforms the state of the art in terms of 3D pose estimation in controlled environments (Human3.6M) and shows promising results for in-the-wild images (LSP). This demonstrates that CNNs trained on artificial images generalize well to real images.