We propose RANA, a relightable and articulated neural avatar for the photorealistic synthesis of humans under arbitrary viewpoints, body poses, and lighting. We only require a short video clip of the person to create the avatar and assume no knowledge about the lighting environment. We present a novel framework to model humans while disentangling their geometry, texture, and also lighting environment from monocular RGB videos. To simplify this otherwise ill-posed task we first estimate the coarse geometry and texture of the person via SMPL+D model fitting and then learn an articulated neural representation for photorealistic image generation. RANA first generates the normal and albedo maps of the person in any given target body pose and then uses spherical harmonics lighting to generate the shaded image in the target lighting environment. We also propose to pretrain RANA using synthetic images and demonstrate that it leads to better disentanglement between geometry and texture while also improving robustness to novel body poses. Finally, we also present a new photorealistic synthetic dataset, Relighting Humans, to quantitatively evaluate the performance of the proposed approach.

Denoising diffusion models hold great promise for generating diverse and realistic human motions. However, existing motion diffusion models largely disregard the laws of physics in the diffusion process and often generate physically-implausible motions with pronounced artifacts such as floating, foot sliding, and ground penetration. This seriously impacts the quality of generated motions and limits their real-world application. To address this issue, we present a novel physics-guided motion diffusion model (PhysDiff), which incorporates physical constraints into the diffusion process. Specifically, we propose a physics-based motion projection module that uses motion imitation in a physics simulator to project the denoised motion of a diffusion step to a physically-plausible motion. The projected motion is further used in the next diffusion step to guide the denoising diffusion process. Intuitively, the use of physics in our model iteratively pulls the motion toward a physically-plausible space. Experiments on large-scale human motion datasets show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art motion quality and improves physical plausibility drastically (>78% for all datasets).

控制铰接对象时控制其姿势对于电影虚拟现实或动画等应用至关重要。然而，操纵对象的姿势需要了解其基础结构，即其关节以及它们如何互相互动。不幸的是，假设要知道的结构，因为现有方法所做的，排除了在新的对象类别上工作的能力。我们建议通过观察它们从多个视图移动，没有额外的监督，例如联合注释或有关该结构的信息，从而了解先前看不见的对象的外观和结构。我们的洞察力是，相对于彼此移动的相邻部件必须通过接头连接。为了利用这一观察，我们将3D的物体部分塑造为椭圆体，这使我们能够识别关节。我们将这种明确表示与隐式的表示，该显式表示可以补偿引入的近似值。我们表明我们的方法为不同的结构，从四足动物到单臂机器人到人类工作。

我们提出了一种从动态摄像机记录的单像素视频中恢复的3D全局人体网格恢复方法。即使在镜头的视野之外，我们的方法也适于严重和长期闭塞，并使人体追踪人体。为实现这一目标，我们首先提出了一种深入的生成运动infiller，该infill是基于可见运动的自向填充遮挡人体的身体运动。另外，与事先工作相比，我们的方法即使用动态摄像机也将在一致的全局坐标中重建人体网格。由于人类动作和相机姿势的联合重建是受到的，我们提出了一种全球轨迹预测因素，以基于当地机身运动产生全球人类轨迹。使用预测的轨迹作为锚点，我们介绍了一种全局优化框架，它可以改进预测的轨迹，并优化相机姿势以匹配诸如2D关键点之类的视频证据。具有动态摄像机的挑战性挑战和野外数据集的实验表明，在运动缺陷和全局网格恢复方面，所提出的方法显着优于现有方法。

人类运动合成是机器人技术的图形，游戏和仿真环境中应用的重要问题。现有方法需要准确的运动捕获数据进行培训，这是昂贵的。取而代之的是，我们为直接从单眼RGB视频中训练物理上合理的人类运动的生成模型提出了一个框架，该模型更广泛地可用。我们方法的核心是一种新颖的优化公式，该公式通过以可区分的方式执行物理限制和有关接触的原因来纠正不完美的基于图像的姿势估计。该优化得出校正后的3D姿势和运动及其相应的接触力。结果表明，我们的物理校正运动在姿势估计上显着优于先前的工作。然后，我们可以使用它们来训练生成模型来综合未来的运动。与先前的基于运动学和物理学的方法相比，我们在人类36m数据集中〜\ cite {H36M_P​​AMI}实现了定性和定量改进的运动估计，合成质量和物理合理性。通过从视频中学习运动合成，我们的方法为大规模，现实和多样化的运动合成铺平了道路。项目页面：\ url {https://nv-tlabs.github.io/publication/iccv_2021_physics/}

Several self-supervised representation learning methods have been proposed for reinforcement learning (RL) with rich observations. For real-world applications of RL, recovering underlying latent states is crucial, particularly when sensory inputs contain irrelevant and exogenous information. In this work, we study how information bottlenecks can be used to construct latent states efficiently in the presence of task-irrelevant information. We propose architectures that utilize variational and discrete information bottlenecks, coined as RepDIB, to learn structured factorized representations. Exploiting the expressiveness bought by factorized representations, we introduce a simple, yet effective, bottleneck that can be integrated with any existing self-supervised objective for RL. We demonstrate this across several online and offline RL benchmarks, along with a real robot arm task, where we find that compressed representations with RepDIB can lead to strong performance improvements, as the learned bottlenecks help predict only the relevant state while ignoring irrelevant information.

Effective management of public shared spaces such as car parking space, is one challenging transformational aspect for many cities, especially in the developing World. By leveraging sensing technologies, cloud computing, and Artificial Intelligence, Cities are increasingly being managed smartly. Smart Cities not only bring convenience to City dwellers, but also improve their quality of life as advocated for by United Nations in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal on Sustainable Cities and Communities. Through integration of Internet of Things and Cloud Computing, this paper presents a successful proof-of-concept implementation of a framework for managing public car parking spaces. Reservation of parking slots is done through a cloud-hosted application, while access to and out of the parking slot is enabled through Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology which in real-time, accordingly triggers update of the parking slot availability in the cloud-hosted database. This framework could bring considerable convenience to City dwellers since motorists only have to drive to a parking space when sure of a vacant parking slot, an important stride towards realization of sustainable smart cities and communities.

Driving through pothole infested roads is a life hazard and economically costly. The experience is even worse for motorists using the pothole filled road for the first time. Pothole-filled road networks have been associated with severe traffic jam especially during peak times of the day. Besides not being fuel consumption friendly and being time wasting, traffic jams often lead to increased carbon emissions as well as noise pollution. Moreover, the risk of fatal accidents has also been strongly associated with potholes among other road network factors. Discovering potholes prior to using a particular road is therefore of significant importance. This work presents a successful demonstration of sensor-based pothole mapping agent that captures both the pothole's depth as well as its location coordinates, parameters that are then used to generate a pothole map for the agent's entire journey. The map can thus be shared with all motorists intending to use the same route.

Quantitative cephalometric analysis is the most widely used clinical and research tool in modern orthodontics. Accurate localization of cephalometric landmarks enables the quantification and classification of anatomical abnormalities, however, the traditional manual way of marking these landmarks is a very tedious job. Endeavours have constantly been made to develop automated cephalometric landmark detection systems but they are inadequate for orthodontic applications. The fundamental reason for this is that the amount of publicly available datasets as well as the images provided for training in these datasets are insufficient for an AI model to perform well. To facilitate the development of robust AI solutions for morphometric analysis, we organise the CEPHA29 Automatic Cephalometric Landmark Detection Challenge in conjunction with IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI 2023). In this context, we provide the largest known publicly available dataset, consisting of 1000 cephalometric X-ray images. We hope that our challenge will not only derive forward research and innovation in automatic cephalometric landmark identification but will also signal the beginning of a new era in the discipline.

Data scarcity is a notable problem, especially in the medical domain, due to patient data laws. Therefore, efficient Pre-Training techniques could help in combating this problem. In this paper, we demonstrate that a model trained on the time direction of functional neuro-imaging data could help in any downstream task, for example, classifying diseases from healthy controls in fMRI data. We train a Deep Neural Network on Independent components derived from fMRI data using the Independent component analysis (ICA) technique. It learns time direction in the ICA-based data. This pre-trained model is further trained to classify brain disorders in different datasets. Through various experiments, we have shown that learning time direction helps a model learn some causal relation in fMRI data that helps in faster convergence, and consequently, the model generalizes well in downstream classification tasks even with fewer data records.