VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Bharat Lal Bhatnagar
dblp:204/2998
· DBLP profile ↗
21ranked-venue papers
5as first author
14since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 20 · 4 first-author · 14 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 16 · 5 first-author · 9 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Masked Modeling for Human Motion Recovery Under OcclusionsabstractHuman motion reconstruction from monocular videos is a fundamental challenge in computer vision, with broad applications in AR/VR, robotics, and digital content creation, but remains challenging under frequent occlusions in real-world settings. Existing regression-based methods are efficient but fragile to missing observations, while optimization- and diffusion-based approaches improve robustness at the cost of slow inference speed and heavy preprocessing steps. To address these limitations, we leverage recent advances in generative masked modeling and present MoRo: Masked mOdeling for human motion Recovery under Occlusions. MoRo is an occlusion-robust, end-to-end generative framework that formulates motion reconstruction as a video-conditioned task, and efficiently recover human motion in a consistent global coordinate system from RGB videos. By masked modeling, MoRo naturally handles occlusions while enabling efficient, end-to-end inference. To overcome the scarcity of paired video-motion data, we design a cross-modality learning scheme that learns multimodal priors from a set of heterogeneous datasets: (i) a trajectory-aware motion prior trained on MoCap datasets, (ii) an image-conditioned pose prior trained on image-pose datasets, capturing diverse frame-level poses, and (iii) a video-conditioned masked transformer that fuses motion and pose priors, finetuned on video-motion datasets to integrate visual cues with motion dynamics for robust inference. Extensive experiments on EgoBody and RICH demonstrate that MoRo substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and motion realism under occlusions, while performing on-par in non-occluded scenarios. MoRo achieves real-time inference at 70 FPS on a single H200 GPU. Project page: https://mikeqzy.github.io/MoRo. Zhiyin Qian, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Federica Bogo, Siyu Tang 0001 |
3DV | 3 |
| 2025 | FORCE: Physics-Aware Human-Object InteractionabstractInteractions between human and objects are influenced not only by the object's pose and shape, but also by physical attributes such as object mass and surface friction. They introduce important motion nuances that are essential for diversity and realism. Despite advancements in recent human-object interaction methods, this aspect has been overlooked. Generating nuanced human motion presents two challenges. First, it is non-trivial to learn from multi-modal human and object information derived from both the physical and non-physical attributes. Second, there exists no dataset capturing nuanced human interactions with objects of varying physical properties, hampering model development. This work addresses the gap by introducing the FORCE model, an approach for synthesizing diverse, nuanced human-object interactions by modeling physical attributes. Our key insight is that human motion is dictated by the interrelation between the force exerted by the human and the perceived resistance. Guided by a novel intuitive physics encoding, the model captures the interplay between human force and resistance. Experiments also demonstrate incorporating human force facilitates learning multi-class motion. Accompanying our model, we contribute a dataset, which features diverse, different-styled motion through interactions with varying resistances. Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Sebastian Starke, Ilya Petrov, Vladimir Guzov, Helisa Dhamo, Eduardo Pérez-Pellitero, Gerard Pons-Moll |
3DV | 2 |
| 2024 | GAN-Avatar: Controllable Personalized GAN-based Human Head AvatarabstractDigital humans and, especially, 3D facial avatars have raised a lot of attention in the past years, as they are the backbone of several applications like immersive telepresence in AR or VR. Despite the progress, facial avatars reconstructed from commodity hardware are incomplete and miss out on parts of the side and back of the head, severely limiting the usability of the avatar. This limitation in prior work stems from their requirement of face tracking, which fails for profile and back views. To address this issue, we propose to learn person-specific animatable avatars from images without assuming to have access to precise facial expression tracking. At the core of our method, we leverage a 3D-aware generative model that is trained to reproduce the distribution of facial expressions from the training data. To train this appearance model, we only assume to have a collection of 2D images with the corresponding camera parameters. For controlling the model, we learn a mapping from 3DMM facial expression parameters to the latent space of the generative model. This mapping can be learned by sampling the latent space of the appearance model and reconstructing the facial parameters from a normalized frontal view, where facial expression estimation performs well. With this scheme, we decouple 3D appearance reconstruction and animation control to achieve high fidelity in image synthesis. In a series of experiments, we compare our proposed technique to state-of-the-art monocular methods and show superior quality while not requiring expression tracking of the training data. Berna Kabadayi, Wojciech Zielonka, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Gerard Pons-Moll, Justus Thies |
3DV | 3 |
| 2024 | Template Free Reconstruction of Human-object Interaction with Procedural Interaction GenerationabstractReconstructing human-object interaction in 3D from a single RGB image is a challenging task and existing data driven methods do not generalize beyond the objects present in the carefully curated 3D interaction datasets. Capturing large-scale real data to learn strong interaction and 3D shape priors is very expensive due to the combinato-rial nature of human-object interactions. In this paper, we propose ProciGen (Procedural interaction Generation), a method to procedurally generate datasets with both, plau-sible interaction and diverse object variation. We gener-ate 1M+ human-object interaction pairs in 3D and lever-age this large-scale data to train our HDM (Hierarchical Diffusion Model), a novel method to reconstruct interacting human and unseen object instances, without any tem-plates. Our HDM is an image-conditioned diffusion model that learns both realistic interaction and highly accurate human and object shapes. Experiments show that our HDM trained with ProciGen significantly outperforms prior meth-ods that require template meshes, and our dataset allows training methods with strong generalization ability to un-seen object instances. Our code and data are released. Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Jan Eric Lenssen, Gerard Pons-Moll |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2024 | RoHM: Robust Human Motion Reconstruction via DiffusionabstractWe propose RoHM, an approach for robust 3D human motion reconstruction from monocular RGB(-D) videos in the presence of noise and occlusions. Most previous approaches either train neural networks to directly regress motion in 3D or learn data-driven motion priors and com-bine them with optimization at test time. The former do not recover globally coherent motion and fail under occlusions; the latter are time-consuming, prone to local minima, and require manual tuning. To overcome these shortcomings, we exploit the iterative, denoising nature of diffusion models. RoHM is a novel diffusion-based motion model that, conditioned on noisy and occluded input data, reconstructs complete, plausible motions in consistent global co-ordinates. Given the complexity of the problem - requiring one to address different tasks (denoising and infilling) in different solution spaces (local and global motion) - we de-compose it into two sub-tasks and learn two models, one for global trajectory and one for local motion. To capture the correlations between the two, we then introduce a novel conditioning module, combining it with an iterative inference scheme. We apply RoHM to a variety of tasks from motion reconstruction and denoising to spatial and temporal infilling. Extensive experiments on three popular datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches qualitatively and quantitatively, while being faster at test time. The code is available at https://sanweiliti.github.io/ROHM/ROHM.html. Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Yuanlu Xu, Alexander Winkler, Petr Kadlecek, Siyu Tang 0001, Federica Bogo |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2024 | GEARS: Local Geometry-Aware Hand-Object Interaction SynthesisabstractGenerating realistic hand motion sequences in interaction with objects has gained increasing attention with the growing interest in digital humans. Prior work has illustrated the effectiveness of employing occupancy-based or distance-based virtual sensors to extract hand-object interaction features. Nonetheless, these methods show limited generalizability across object categories, shapes and sizes. We hypothesize that this is due to two reasons: 1) the limited expressiveness of employed virtual sensors, and 2) scarcity of available training data. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel joint-centered sensor designed to reason about local object geometry near potential interaction regions. The sensor queries for object surface points in the neighbourhood of each hand joint. As an important step to-wards mitigating the learning complexity, we transform the points from global frame to hand template frame and use a shared module to process sensor features of each individual joint. This is followed by a spatio-temporal transformer network aimed at capturing correlation among the joints in different dimensions. Moreover, we devise simple heuristic rules to augment the limited training sequences with vast static hand grasping samples. This leads to a broader spectrum of grasping types observed during training, in turn enhancing our model's generalization capability. We evaluate on two public datasets, GRAB and InterCap, where our method shows superiority over baselines both quantitatively and perceptually. Keyang Zhou, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Jan Eric Lenssen, Gerard Pons-Moll |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2023 | Visibility Aware Human-Object Interaction Tracking from Single RGB CameraabstractCapturing the interactions between humans and their environment in 3D is important for many applications in robotics, graphics, and vision. Recent works to reconstruct the 3D human and object from a single RGB image do not have consistent relative translation across frames because they assume a fixed depth. Moreover, their performance drops significantly when the object is occluded. In this work, we propose a novel method to track the 3D human, object, contacts, and relative translation across frames from a single RGB camera, while being robust to heavy occlusions. Our method is built on two key insights. First, we condition our neural field reconstructions for human and object on per-frame SMPL model estimates obtained by pre-fitting SMPL to a video sequence. This improves neural reconstruction accuracy and produces coherent relative translation across frames. Second, human and object motion from visible frames provides valuable information to infer the occluded object. We propose a novel transformer-based neural network that explicitly uses object visibility and human motion to leverage neighboring frames to make predictions for the occluded frames. Building on these insights, our method is able to track both human and object robustly even under occlusions. Experiments on two datasets show that our method significantly improves over the state-of-the-art methods. Our code and pretrained models are available at: https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/VisTracker. Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Gerard Pons-Moll |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2023 | NSF: Neural Surface Fields for Human Modeling from Monocular DepthabstractObtaining personalized 3D animatable avatars from a monocular camera has several real world applications in gaming, virtual try-on, animation, and VR/XR, etc. However, it is very challenging to model dynamic and finegrained clothing deformations from such sparse data. Existing methods for modeling 3D humans from depth data have limitations in terms of computational efficiency, mesh coherency, and flexibility in resolution and topology. For instance, reconstructing shapes using implicit functions and extracting explicit meshes per frame is computationally expensive and cannot ensure coherent meshes across frames. Moreover, predicting per-vertex deformations on a predesigned human template with a discrete surface lacks flexibility in resolution and topology. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel method 'NSF : Neural Surface Fields’ for modeling 3D clothed humans from monocular depth. NSF defines a neural field solely on the base surface which models a continuous and flexible displacement field. NSF can be adapted to the base surface with different resolution and topology without retraining at inference time. Compared to existing approaches, our method eliminates the expensive per-frame surface extraction while maintaining mesh coherency, and is capable of reconstructing meshes with arbitrary resolution without retraining. To foster research in this direction, we release our code in project page at: https://yuxuan-xue.com/nsf. Yuxuan Xue 0001, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Riccardo Marin, Nikolaos Sarafianos, Yuanlu Xu, Gerard Pons-Moll, Tony Tung |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2022 | Any-Shot GIN: Generalizing Implicit Networks for Reconstructing Novel ClassesabstractWe address the task of estimating the 3D shapes of novel shape classes from a single RGB image. Prior works are either limited to reconstructing known training classes or are unable to reconstruct high-quality shapes. To solve those issues, we propose Generalizing Implicit Networks (GIN) which decomposes 3D reconstruction into 1.) front-back depth estimation followed by differentiable depth voxelization, and 2.) implicit shape completion with 3D features. The key insight is that the depth estimation network learns local class-agnostic shape priors, allowing us to generalize to novel classes, while our implicit shape completion network is able to predict accurate shapes with rich details by learning implicit surfaces in 3D voxel space. We conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale benchmark using 55 classes of ShapeNet and real images of Pix3D. We qualitatively and quantitatively show that the proposed GIN significantly outperforms the state of the art on both seen and novel shape classes for single-image 3D reconstruction. We also illustrate that our GIN can be further improved by using only few-shot depth supervision from novel classes. Yongqin Xian, Julian Chibane, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Bernt Schiele, Zeynep Akata, Gerard Pons-Moll |
3DV | 3 |
| 2022 | Adjoint Rigid Transform Network: Task-conditioned Alignment of 3D ShapesabstractMost learning methods for 3D data suffer significant performance drops when the data is not carefully aligned to a canonical orientation. Aligning real world 3D data collected from different sources is non-trivial and requires manual intervention. In this paper, we propose the Adjoint Rigid Transform (ART) Network, a neural module which can be integrated with a variety of 3D networks to significantly boost their performance. ART learns to rotate input shapes to a learned canonical orientation, which is crucial for a lot of tasks such as shape reconstruction, interpolation, non-rigid registration, and latent disentanglement. ART achieves this with self-supervision and a rotation equivariance constraint on predicted rotations. With only self-supervision, ART facilitates learning a canonical orientation for both rigid and nonrigid shapes, which leads to a notable boost in performance of aforementioned tasks. Our code and model are available at [2]. Keyang Zhou, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Bernt Schiele, Gerard Pons-Moll |
3DV | 2 |
| 2022 | BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object InteractionsabstractModelling interactions between humans and objects in natural environments is central to many applications including gaming, virtual and mixed reality, as well as human behavior analysis and human-robot collaboration. This challenging operation scenario requires generalization to vast number of objects, scenes, and human actions. Unfortunately, there exist no such dataset. Moreover, this data needs to be acquired in diverse natural environments, which rules out 4D scanners and marker based capture systems. We present BEHAVE dataset, the first full body human-object interaction dataset with multi-view RGBD frames and corresponding 3D SMPL and object fits along with the annotated contacts between them. We record ~15k frames at 5 locations with 8 subjects performing a wide range of interactions with 20 common objects. We use this data to learn a model that can jointly track humans and objects in natural environments with an easy-to-use portable multi-camera setup. Our key insight is to predict correspondences from the human and the object to a statistical body model to obtain human-object contacts during interactions. Our approach can record and track not just the humans and objects but also their interactions, modeled as surface contacts, in 3D. Our code and data can be found at: http://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/behave. Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Ilia A. Petrov 0001, Cristian Sminchisescu, Christian Theobalt, Gerard Pons-Moll |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2022 | CHORE: Contact, Human and Object Reconstruction from a Single RGB Image
Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Gerard Pons-Moll |
ECCV (2) | 2 |
| 2022 | COUCH: Towards Controllable Human-Chair Interactions
Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Sebastian Starke, Vladimir Guzov, Gerard Pons-Moll |
ECCV (5) | 2 |
| 2022 | TOCH: Spatio-Temporal Object-to-Hand Correspondence for Motion Refinement
Keyang Zhou, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Jan Eric Lenssen, Gerard Pons-Moll |
ECCV (3) | 2 |
| 2020 | Combining Implicit Function Learning and Parametric Models for 3D Human Reconstruction
Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Cristian Sminchisescu, Christian Theobalt, Gerard Pons-Moll |
ECCV (2) | 1 |
| 2020 | SIZER: A Dataset and Model for Parsing 3D Clothing and Learning Size Sensitive 3D Clothing
Garvita Tiwari, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Tony Tung, Gerard Pons-Moll |
ECCV (3) | 2 |
| 2020 | Unsupervised Shape and Pose Disentanglement for 3D Meshes
Keyang Zhou, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Gerard Pons-Moll |
ECCV (22) | 2 |
| 2020 | LoopReg: Self-supervised Learning of Implicit Surface Correspondences, Pose and Shape for 3D Human Mesh RegistrationabstractWe address the problem of fitting 3D human models to 3D scans of dressed humans. Classical methods optimize both the data-to-model correspondences and the human model parameters (pose and shape), but are reliable only when initialised close to the solution. Some methods initialize the optimization based on fully supervised correspondence predictors, which is not differentiable end-to-end, and can only process a single scan at a time. Our main contribution is LoopReg, an end-to-end learning framework to register a corpus of scans to a common 3D human model. The key idea is to create a self-supervised loop. A backward map, parameterized by a Neural Network, predicts the correspondence from every scan point to the surface of the human model. A forward map, parameterized by a human model, transforms the corresponding points back to the scan based on the model parameters (pose and shape), thus closing the loop. Formulating this closed loop is not straightforward because it is not trivial to force the output of the NN to be on the surface of the human model -- outside this surface the human model is not even defined. To this end, we propose two key innovations. First, we define the canonical surface implicitly as the zero level set of a distance field in R3, which in contrast to more common UV parameterizations does not require cutting the surface, does not have discontinuities, and does not induce distortion. Second, we diffuse the human model to the 3D domain. This allows to map the NN predictions forward, even when they slightly deviate from the zero level set. Results demonstrate that we can train LoopReg mainly self-supervised -- following a supervised warm-start, the model becomes increasingly more accurate as additional unlabelled raw scans are processed. Our code and pre-trained models can be downloaded for research. Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Cristian Sminchisescu, Christian Theobalt, Gerard Pons-Moll |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2019 | Learning to Reconstruct People in Clothing From a Single RGB CameraabstractWe present Octopus, a learning-based model to infer the personalized 3D shape of people from a few frames (1-8) of a monocular video in which the person is moving with a reconstruction accuracy of 4 to 5mm, while being orders of magnitude faster than previous methods. From semantic segmentation images, our Octopus model reconstructs a 3D shape, including the parameters of SMPL plus clothing and hair in 10 seconds or less. The model achieves fast and accurate predictions based on two key design choices. First, by predicting shape in a canonical T-pose space, the network learns to encode the images of the person into pose-invariant latent codes, where the information is fused. Second, based on the observation that feed-forward predictions are fast but do not always align with the input images, we predict using both, bottom-up and top-down streams (one per view) allowing information to flow in both directions. Learning relies only on synthetic 3D data. Once learned, Octopus can take a variable number of frames as input, and is able to reconstruct shapes even from a single image with an accuracy of 5mm. Results on 3 different datasets demonstrate the efficacy and accuracy of our approach. Thiemo Alldieck, Marcus A. Magnor, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Christian Theobalt, Gerard Pons-Moll |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2019 | Multi-Garment Net: Learning to Dress 3D People From ImagesabstractWe present Multi-Garment Network (MGN), a method to predict body shape and clothing, layered on top of the SMPL [40] model from a few frames (1-8) of a video. Several experiments demonstrate that this representation allows higher level of control when compared to single mesh or voxel representations of shape. Our model allows to predict garment geometry, relate it to the body shape, and transfer it to new body shapes and poses. To train MGN, we leverage a digital wardrobe containing 712 digital garments in correspondence, obtained with a novel method to register a set of clothing templates to a dataset of real 3D scans of people in different clothing and poses. Garments from the digital wardrobe, or predicted by MGN, can be used to dress any body shape in arbitrary poses. We will make publicly available the digital wardrobe, the MGN model, and code to dress SMPL with the garments at [1]. Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Garvita Tiwari, Christian Theobalt, Gerard Pons-Moll |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2017 | Unsupervised Learning of Deep Feature Representation for Clustering Egocentric ActionsabstractPopularity of wearable cameras in life logging, law enforcement, assistive vision and other similar applications is leading to explosion in generation of egocentric video content. First person action recognition is an important aspect of automatic analysis of such videos. Annotating such videos is hard, not only because of obvious scalability constraints, but also because of privacy issues often associated with egocentric videos. This motivates the use of unsupervised methods for egocentric video analysis. In this work, we propose a robust and generic unsupervised approach for first person action clustering. Unlike the contemporary approaches, our technique is neither limited to any particular class of actions nor requires priors such as pre-training, fine-tuning, etc. We learn time sequenced visual and flow features from an array of weak feature extractors based on convolutional and LSTM autoencoder networks. We demonstrate that clustering of such features leads to the discovery of semantically meaningful actions present in the video. We validate our approach on four disparate public egocentric actions datasets amounting to approximately 50 hours of videos. We show that our approach surpasses the supervised state of the art accuracies without using the action labels. Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Suriya Singh, Chetan Arora 0001, C. V. Jawahar |
IJCAI | 1 |