Estimating the 3D structure of the human body from nat-ural scenes is afundamental aspect of visual perception. 3D human pose estimation is a vital step in advancing fields like AIGC and human-robot interaction, serving as a crucial tech-nique for understanding and interacting with human actions in real-world settings. However, the current datasets, often collected under single laboratory conditions using complex motion capture equipment and unvarying backgrounds, are insufficient. The absence of datasets on variable conditions is stalling the progress of this crucial task. To facilitate the development of 3D pose estimation, we present FreeMan, the first large-scale, multi-view dataset collected under the real-world conditions. FreeMan was captured by synchronizing 8 smartphones across diverse scenarios. It comprises 11M frames from 8000 sequences, viewed from different perspec-tives. These sequences cover 40 subjects across 10 different scenarios, each with varying lighting conditions. We have also established an semi-automated pipeline containing er-ror detection to reduce the workload of manual check and ensure precise annotation. We provide comprehensive eval-uation baselines for a range of tasks, underlining the sig-nificant challenges posed by FreeMan. Further evaluations of standard indoor/outdoor human sensing datasets reveal that FreeMan offers robust representation transferability in real and complex scenes. FreeMan is publicly available at https://wangjiongw.github.io/freeman.

Recovering the physical attributes of an object’s appearance from its images captured under an unknown illumination is challenging yet essential for photo-realistic rendering. Recent approaches adopt the emerging implicit scene representations and have shown impressive results. However, they unanimously adopt a surface-based representation, and hence can not well handle scenes with very complex geometry, translucent object and etc. In this paper, we propose to conduct inverse volume rendering, in contrast to surface-based, by representing a scene using microflake volume, which assumes the space is filled with infinite small flakes and light reflects or scatters at each spatial location according to microflake distributions. We further adopt the coordinate networks to implicitly encode the microflake volume, and develop a differentiable microflake volume renderer to train the network in an end-to-end way in principle. Our NeMF enables effective recovery of appearance attributes for highly complex geometry and scattering object, enables high-quality relighting, material editing, and especially simulates volume rendering effects, such as scattering, which is infeasible for surface-based approaches. Our data and code are available at: https://github.com/YoujiaZhang/NeMF.

Abstract Adding screentone to initial line drawings is a crucial step for manga generation, but is a tedious and human‐laborious task. In this work, we propose a novel data‐driven method aiming to transfer the screentone pattern from a reference manga image. This not only ensures the quality, but also adds controllability to the generated manga results. The reference‐based screentone translation task imposes several unique challenges. Since manga image often contains multiple screentone patterns interweaved with line drawing, as an abstract art, this makes it even more difficult to extract disentangled style code from the reference. Also, finding correspondence for mapping between the reference and the input line drawing without any screentone is hard. As screentone contains many subtle details, how to guarantee the style consistency to the reference remains challenging. To suit our purpose and resolve the above difficulties, we propose a novel Reference‐based Screentone Transfer Network (RSTN). We encode the screentone style through a 1D stylegram. A patch correspondence loss is designed to build a similarity mapping function for guiding the translation. To mitigate the generated artefacts, a pattern regularization loss is introduced in the patch‐level. Through extensive experiments and a user study, we have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed model.

We present a novel high-resolution face swapping method using the inherent prior knowledge of a pre-trained GAN model. Although previous research can leverage generative priors to produce high-resolution results, their quality can suffer from the entangled semantics of the latent space. We explicitly disentangle the latent semantics by utilizing the progressive nature of the generator, deriving structure at-tributes from the shallow layers and appearance attributes from the deeper ones. Identity and pose information within the structure attributes are further separated by introducing a landmark-driven structure transfer latent direction. The disentangled latent code produces rich generative features that incorporate feature blending to produce a plausible swapping result. We further extend our method to video face swapping by enforcing two spatio-temporal constraints on the latent space and the image space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art image/video face swapping methods in terms of hallucination quality and consistency. Code can be found at: https://github.com/cnnlstm/FSLSD_HiRes.

Nowadays, with the vigorous expansion and development of gaming video streaming techniques and services, the expectation of users, especially the mobile phone users, for higher quality of experience is also growing swiftly. As most of the existing research focuses on traditional video streaming, there is a clear lack of both subjective study and objective quality models that are tailored for quality assessment of mobile gaming content. To this end, in this study, we first present a brand new Tencent Gaming Video dataset containing 1293 mobile gaming sequences encoded with three different codecs. Second, we propose an objective quality framework, namely Efficient hard-RAnk Quality Estimator (ERAQUE), that is equipped with (1) a novel hard pairwise ranking loss, which forces the model to put more emphasis on differentiating similar pairs; (2) an adapted model distillation strategy, which could be utilized to compress the proposed model efficiently without causing significant performance drop. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our model.

Automation testing is an important approach for bug detection and analysis of software applications, especially for computer games. This paper proposes an efficient imitation method to learn game strategy from a small set of manually recorded game samples, which only takes one hour to complete training. This work can be divided into four steps. Firstly, we collect a set of manually recorded data composed of image frames and user actions. The discriminative region is extracted from image to eliminate noise. Then, data alignment is applied to solve the problem of action delay. Due to the large variation of image samples from different classes, data resampling is performed to avoid bias. Finally, these samples are fed into a fast and lightweight network with LSTM structure, which is designed to boost speed of prediction. Our work discards the dependence of game internal interface and performs well in real time with CPU, which has been verified in a variety of commercial games.

This paper proposes an AI fighting strategies generation approach implemented in the turn-based fighting game StoneAge 2 (SA2). Our research aim is to develop such AI for choosing the logical skills and targets to the player. The approach trained the logistical regression (LR) model and deep neural networks (DNN) model, individually. And combined both output at inference process. Meanwhile, to transform the features into a higher dimension binary vector without any manual intervention or any prior knowledge, we put all category features into Gradient Boosted Decision Tree (GBDT) before LR component. The main advantage of this procedure is the approach combines the benefits of LR models (memorization of feature interactions) and DL (generation the unseen feature combination through low-dimensional dense feature) for the AI fighting system. In our experiment, we evaluated our model with some other AI strategies (Reinforcement Learning (RL), GBDT, LR, DNN) to against a robot script. The results shown that the players, participating in the experiment, are capable of using reasonable strategic skills on the different targets. As a consequence, the win rate (versus with the robot script) of our system is higher than the others. Finally, we productionized and evaluated the system on SA 2, a commercial mobile turn-based game.