Spatio-temporal motion completion using a sequence of latent primitives

We propose a markerless performance capture method that computes a temporally coherent 4D representation of an actor deforming over time from a sparsely sampled sequence of untracked 3D point clouds. Our method proceeds by latent optimization with a spatio-temporal motion prior. Recently, task generic motion priors have been introduced and propose a coherent representation of human motion based on a single latent code, with encouraging results with short sequences and given temporal correspondences. Extending these methods to longer sequences without correspondences is all but straightforward. One latent code proves inefficient to encode longer term variability, and latent space optimization will be very susceptible to erroneous local minima due to possible inverted pose fittings. We address both problems by learning a motion prior that encodes a 4D human motion sequence into a sequence of latent primitives instead of one latent code. We also propose an additional mapping encoder which directly projects a sequence of point clouds into the learned latent space to provide a good initialization of the latent representation at inference time. Our temporal decoding from latent space is implicit and continuous in time, providing flexibility with temporal resolution. We show experimentally that our method outperforms state-of-the-art motion priors.