Computer Vision News - December 2020

3 Naureen Mahmood 45 Working at Max Planck, there was a lot of research being published and also a lot that was never published. It was useful, but it wasn’t really novel, or it wasn’t packaged up in a publishable manner. What we found was that at almost every conference, we would be contacted by other researchers, other institutes, and then slowly other industries, asking us questions about how they can use our research in their applications and asking for ways to make it easy for them to use. To go back a little bit and tell you about the technology itself, we are building 3D statistical models to understand how humans move and how humans look. This goes from the surface of skin deformations, how the skin deforms when we are moving, also how the body sizes change across a population. We combine that into this statistical model. It’s parametric, which means you can create different human identities. Independent of that, we can also create many different realistic poses. The muscles and the surface of the skin automatically deform for each different pose. This is something that we have learned from the 3D scanned data. You are not the first to work on that. What is special about your work? There are many people who are working on bodies from images, bodies from scans. The special part really is that nobody had learned this way, from real 3D scanned data. By the time I left Max Planck, they had multiple large full-body 3D scanners. They were one of the first in the world to have a full body 3D scanning system. Then they also upgraded it later on to get a full body, 4D scan, so that it would be able to capture the dynamics of the soft tissue when you are moving. This helped us create a very large dataset of high-resolution 3D scans. Learning how human identities change across a populationwas a very hard process. Since there are so many 3D scanning systems, a lot of people can do that. However, the many years that it has taken us to get this, that’s a very important ingredient here. A lot of people have the ability to capture a 3D scan. Every 3D scan is sort of “We were the first ones to do that in a way that was easy to use!”