Capturing accurate 3D human pose in the wild would provide valuable data for training pose estimation and motion generation methods. While video-based estimation approaches have become increasingly accurate, they often fail in common scenarios involving self-contact, such as a hand touching the face. In contrast, wearable bioimpedance sensing can cheaply and unobtrusively measure ground-truth skin-to-skin contact. Consequently, we propose a novel framework that combines visual pose estimators with bioimpedance sensing to capture the 3D pose of people by taking self-contact into account. Our method, BioTUCH, initializes the pose using an off-the-shelf estimator and introduces contact-aware pose optimization during measured self-contact: reprojection error and deviations from the input estimate are minimized while enforcing vertex proximity constraints. We validate our approach using a new dataset of synchronized RGB video, bioimpedance measurements, and 3D motion capture. Testing with three input pose estimators, we demonstrate an average of 11.7% improvement in reconstruction accuracy. We also present a miniature wearable bioimpedance sensor that enables efficient large-scale collection of contact-aware training data for improving pose estimation and generation using BioTUCH. Code and data are available at biotuch.is.tue.mpg.de

Sign language (SL) is the primary method of communication for the 70 million Deaf people around the world. Video dictionaries of isolated signs are a core SL learning tool. Replacing these with 3D avatars can aid learning and enable AR/VR applications, improving access to technology and online media. However, little work has attempted to estimate expressive 3D avatars from SL video; occlusion, noise, and motion blur make this task difficult. We address this by introducing novel linguistic priors that are universally applicable to SL and provide constraints on 3D hand pose that help resolve ambiguities within isolated signs. Our method, SGNify, captures fine-grained hand pose, facial expression, and body movement fully automatically from in-the-wild monocular SL videos. We evaluate SGNify quantitatively by using a commercial motion-capture system to compute 3D avatars synchronized with monocular video. SGNify outperforms state-of-the-art 3D body-pose-and shape-estimation methods on SL videos. A perceptual study shows that SGNify's 3D reconstructions are significantly more comprehensible and natural than those of previous methods and are on par with the source videos. Code and data are available at sgnify.is.tue.mpg.de.