Giorgio Becherini

CV
h-index42
9papers
230citations
Novelty56%
AI Score58

9 Papers

CVDec 31, 2023Code
EMAGE: Towards Unified Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation via Expressive Masked Audio Gesture Modeling

Haiyang Liu, Zihao Zhu, Giorgio Becherini et al.

We propose EMAGE, a framework to generate full-body human gestures from audio and masked gestures, encompassing facial, local body, hands, and global movements. To achieve this, we first introduce BEAT2 (BEAT-SMPLX-FLAME), a new mesh-level holistic co-speech dataset. BEAT2 combines a MoShed SMPL-X body with FLAME head parameters and further refines the modeling of head, neck, and finger movements, offering a community-standardized, high-quality 3D motion captured dataset. EMAGE leverages masked body gesture priors during training to boost inference performance. It involves a Masked Audio Gesture Transformer, facilitating joint training on audio-to-gesture generation and masked gesture reconstruction to effectively encode audio and body gesture hints. Encoded body hints from masked gestures are then separately employed to generate facial and body movements. Moreover, EMAGE adaptively merges speech features from the audio's rhythm and content and utilizes four compositional VQ-VAEs to enhance the results' fidelity and diversity. Experiments demonstrate that EMAGE generates holistic gestures with state-of-the-art performance and is flexible in accepting predefined spatial-temporal gesture inputs, generating complete, audio-synchronized results. Our code and dataset are available https://pantomatrix.github.io/EMAGE/

CVDec 7, 2023Code
Emotional Speech-driven 3D Body Animation via Disentangled Latent Diffusion

Kiran Chhatre, Radek Daněček, Nikos Athanasiou et al. · amazon-science

Existing methods for synthesizing 3D human gestures from speech have shown promising results, but they do not explicitly model the impact of emotions on the generated gestures. Instead, these methods directly output animations from speech without control over the expressed emotion. To address this limitation, we present AMUSE, an emotional speech-driven body animation model based on latent diffusion. Our observation is that content (i.e., gestures related to speech rhythm and word utterances), emotion, and personal style are separable. To account for this, AMUSE maps the driving audio to three disentangled latent vectors: one for content, one for emotion, and one for personal style. A latent diffusion model, trained to generate gesture motion sequences, is then conditioned on these latent vectors. Once trained, AMUSE synthesizes 3D human gestures directly from speech with control over the expressed emotions and style by combining the content from the driving speech with the emotion and style of another speech sequence. Randomly sampling the noise of the diffusion model further generates variations of the gesture with the same emotional expressivity. Qualitative, quantitative, and perceptual evaluations demonstrate that AMUSE outputs realistic gesture sequences. Compared to the state of the art, the generated gestures are better synchronized with the speech content, and better represent the emotion expressed by the input speech. Our code is available at amuse.is.tue.mpg.de.

CVFeb 24
NGL-Prompter: Training-Free Sewing Pattern Estimation from a Single Image

Anna Badalyan, Pratheba Selvaraju, Giorgio Becherini et al.

Estimating sewing patterns from images is a practical approach for creating high-quality 3D garments. Due to the lack of real-world pattern-image paired data, prior approaches fine-tune large vision language models (VLMs) on synthetic garment datasets generated by randomly sampling from a parametric garment model GarmentCode. However, these methods often struggle to generalize to in-the-wild images, fail to capture real-world correlations between garment parts, and are typically restricted to single-layer outfits. In contrast, we observe that VLMs are effective at describing garments in natural language, yet perform poorly when asked to directly regress GarmentCode parameters from images. To bridge this gap, we propose NGL (Natural Garment Language), a novel intermediate language that restructures GarmentCode into a representation more understandable to language models. Leveraging this language, we introduce NGL-Prompter, a training-free pipeline that queries large VLMs to extract structured garment parameters, which are then deterministically mapped to valid GarmentCode. We evaluate our method on the Dress4D, CloSe and a newly collected dataset of approximately 5,000 in-the-wild fashion images. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard geometry metrics and is strongly preferred in both human and GPT-based perceptual evaluations compared to existing baselines. Furthermore, NGL-prompter can recover multi-layer outfits whereas competing methods focus mostly on single-layer garments, highlighting its strong generalization to real-world images even with occluded parts. These results demonstrate that accurate sewing pattern reconstruction is possible without costly model training. Our code and data will be released for research use.

GRMay 15, 2024
ContourCraft: Learning to Resolve Intersections in Neural Multi-Garment Simulations

Artur Grigorev, Giorgio Becherini, Michael J. Black et al.

Learning-based approaches to cloth simulation have started to show their potential in recent years. However, handling collisions and intersections in neural simulations remains a largely unsolved problem. In this work, we present \moniker{}, a learning-based solution for handling intersections in neural cloth simulations. Unlike conventional approaches that critically rely on intersection-free inputs, \moniker{} robustly recovers from intersections introduced through missed collisions, self-penetrating bodies, or errors in manually designed multi-layer outfits. The technical core of \moniker{} is a novel intersection contour loss that penalizes interpenetrations and encourages rapid resolution thereof. We integrate our intersection loss with a collision-avoiding repulsion objective into a neural cloth simulation method based on graph neural networks (GNNs). We demonstrate our method's ability across a challenging set of diverse multi-layer outfits under dynamic human motions. Our extensive analysis indicates that \moniker{} significantly improves collision handling for learned simulation and produces visually compelling results.

CVDec 15, 2024
GenLit: Reformulating Single-Image Relighting as Video Generation

Shrisha Bharadwaj, Haiwen Feng, Giorgio Becherini et al.

Manipulating the illumination of a 3D scene within a single image represents a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. This problem has traditionally been addressed using inverse rendering techniques, which involve explicit 3D asset reconstruction and costly ray-tracing simulations. Meanwhile, recent advancements in visual foundation models suggest that a new paradigm could soon be possible -- one that replaces explicit physical models with networks that are trained on large amounts of image and video data. In this paper, we exploit the implicit scene understanding of a video diffusion model, particularly Stable Video Diffusion, to relight a single image. We introduce GenLit, a framework that distills the ability of a graphics engine to perform light manipulation into a video-generation model, enabling users to directly insert and manipulate a point light in the 3D world within a given image and generate results directly as a video sequence. We find that a model fine-tuned on only a small synthetic dataset generalizes to real-world scenes, enabling single-image relighting with plausible and convincing shadows and inter-reflections. Our results highlight the ability of video foundation models to capture rich information about lighting, material, and shape, and our findings indicate that such models, with minimal training, can be used to perform relighting without explicit asset reconstruction or ray-tracing. . Project page: https://genlit.is.tue.mpg.de/.

CVNov 18, 2025
BEDLAM2.0: Synthetic Humans and Cameras in Motion

Joachim Tesch, Giorgio Becherini, Prerana Achar et al.

Inferring 3D human motion from video remains a challenging problem with many applications. While traditional methods estimate the human in image coordinates, many applications require human motion to be estimated in world coordinates. This is particularly challenging when there is both human and camera motion. Progress on this topic has been limited by the lack of rich video data with ground truth human and camera movement. We address this with BEDLAM2.0, a new dataset that goes beyond the popular BEDLAM dataset in important ways. In addition to introducing more diverse and realistic cameras and camera motions, BEDLAM2.0 increases diversity and realism of body shape, motions, clothing, hair, and 3D environments. Additionally, it adds shoes, which were missing in BEDLAM. BEDLAM has become a key resource for training 3D human pose and motion regressors today and we show that BEDLAM2.0 is significantly better, particularly for training methods that estimate humans in world coordinates. We compare state-of-the art methods trained on BEDLAM and BEDLAM2.0, and find that BEDLAM2.0 significantly improves accuracy over BEDLAM. For research purposes, we provide the rendered videos, ground truth body parameters, and camera motions. We also provide the 3D assets to which we have rights and links to those from third parties.

CVSep 23, 2025
Moving by Looking: Towards Vision-Driven Avatar Motion Generation

Markos Diomataris, Berat Mert Albaba, Giorgio Becherini et al. · eth-zurich

The way we perceive the world fundamentally shapes how we move, whether it is how we navigate in a room or how we interact with other humans. Current human motion generation methods, neglect this interdependency and use task-specific ``perception'' that differs radically from that of humans. We argue that the generation of human-like avatar behavior requires human-like perception. Consequently, in this work we present CLOPS, the first human avatar that solely uses egocentric vision to perceive its surroundings and navigate. Using vision as the primary driver of motion however, gives rise to a significant challenge for training avatars: existing datasets have either isolated human motion, without the context of a scene, or lack scale. We overcome this challenge by decoupling the learning of low-level motion skills from learning of high-level control that maps visual input to motion. First, we train a motion prior model on a large motion capture dataset. Then, a policy is trained using Q-learning to map egocentric visual inputs to high-level control commands for the motion prior. Our experiments empirically demonstrate that egocentric vision can give rise to human-like motion characteristics in our avatars. For example, the avatars walk such that they avoid obstacles present in their visual field. These findings suggest that equipping avatars with human-like sensors, particularly egocentric vision, holds promise for training avatars that behave like humans.

CVSep 1, 2025
Im2Haircut: Single-view Strand-based Hair Reconstruction for Human Avatars

Vanessa Sklyarova, Egor Zakharov, Malte Prinzler et al. · eth-zurich

We present a novel approach for 3D hair reconstruction from single photographs based on a global hair prior combined with local optimization. Capturing strand-based hair geometry from single photographs is challenging due to the variety and geometric complexity of hairstyles and the lack of ground truth training data. Classical reconstruction methods like multi-view stereo only reconstruct the visible hair strands, missing the inner structure of hairstyles and hampering realistic hair simulation. To address this, existing methods leverage hairstyle priors trained on synthetic data. Such data, however, is limited in both quantity and quality since it requires manual work from skilled artists to model the 3D hairstyles and create near-photorealistic renderings. To address this, we propose a novel approach that uses both, real and synthetic data to learn an effective hairstyle prior. Specifically, we train a transformer-based prior model on synthetic data to obtain knowledge of the internal hairstyle geometry and introduce real data in the learning process to model the outer structure. This training scheme is able to model the visible hair strands depicted in an input image, while preserving the general 3D structure of hairstyles. We exploit this prior to create a Gaussian-splatting-based reconstruction method that creates hairstyles from one or more images. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons with existing reconstruction pipelines demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of our method for capturing detailed hair orientation, overall silhouette, and backside consistency. For additional results and code, please refer to https://im2haircut.is.tue.mpg.de.

CVJun 16, 2025
MAMMA: Markerless & Automatic Multi-Person Motion Action Capture

Hanz Cuevas-Velasquez, Anastasios Yiannakidis, Soyong Shin et al.

We present MAMMA, a markerless motion-capture pipeline that accurately recovers SMPL-X parameters from multi-view video of two-person interaction sequences. Traditional motion-capture systems rely on physical markers. Although they offer high accuracy, their requirements of specialized hardware, manual marker placement, and extensive post-processing make them costly and time-consuming. Recent learning-based methods attempt to overcome these limitations, but most are designed for single-person capture, rely on sparse keypoints, or struggle with occlusions and physical interactions. In this work, we introduce a method that predicts dense 2D surface landmarks conditioned on segmentation masks, enabling person-specific correspondence estimation even under heavy occlusion. We employ a novel architecture that exploits learnable queries for each landmark. We demonstrate that our approach can handle complex person--person interaction and offers greater accuracy than existing methods. To train our network, we construct a large, synthetic multi-view dataset combining human motions from diverse sources, including extreme poses, hand motions, and close interactions. Our dataset yields high-variability synthetic sequences with rich body contact and occlusion, and includes SMPL-X ground-truth annotations with dense 2D landmarks. The result is a system capable of capturing human motion without the need for markers. Our approach offers competitive reconstruction quality compared to commercial marker-based motion-capture solutions, without the extensive manual cleanup. Finally, we address the absence of common benchmarks for dense-landmark prediction and markerless motion capture by introducing two evaluation settings built from real multi-view sequences. We will release our dataset, benchmark, method, training code, and pre-trained model weights for research purposes.