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Research Interests

  • Hand-Object Interaction Reconstruction
  • Physics-based Models

Publications

Publication teaser Follow My Hold: Hand-Object Interaction Reconstruction through Geometric Guidance

Ayce Idil Aytekin, Rishabh Dabral, Helge Rhodin, Christian Theobalt

arXiv 2025

Abstract
We propose a novel diffusion-based framework for reconstructing 3D geometry of hand-held objects from monocular RGB images by leveraging hand-object interaction as geometric guidance. Our method conditions a latent diffusion model on an inpainted object appearance and uses inference-time guidance to optimize the object reconstruction, while simultaneously ensuring plausible hand-object interactions. Unlike prior methods that rely on extensive post-processing or produce low-quality reconstructions, our approach directly generates high-quality object geometry during the diffusion process by introducing guidance with an optimization-in-the-loop design. Specifically, we guide the diffusion model by applying supervision to the velocity field while simultaneously optimizing the transformations of both the hand and the object being reconstructed. This optimization is driven by multi-modal geometric cues, including normal and depth alignment, silhouette consistency, and 2D keypoint reprojection. We further incorporate signed distance field supervision and enforce contact and non-intersection constraints to ensure physical plausibility of hand-object interaction. Our method yields accurate, robust and coherent reconstructions under occlusion while generalizing well to in-the-wild scenarios.

[pdf] [project page] [code]


Publication teaser Physics-based Human Pose Estimation from a Single Moving RGB Camera

Ayce Idil Aytekin, Chuqiao Li, Diogo Luvizon, Rishabh Dabral, Martin Oswald, Marc Habermann, Christian Theobalt

CVPRW 2025

Abstract
Most monocular and physics-based human pose tracking methods, while achieving state-of-the-art results, suffer from artifacts when the scene does not have a strictly flat ground plane or when the camera is moving. Moreover, these methods are often evaluated on in-the-wild real world videos without ground-truth data or on synthetic datasets, which fail to model the real world light transport, camera motion, and pose-induced appearance and geometry changes. To tackle these two problems, we introduce MoviCam, the first non-synthetic dataset containing ground-truth camera trajectories of a dynamically moving monocular RGB camera, scene geometry, and 3D human motion with foot contact labels. Additionally, we propose PhysDynPose, a physics-based method that incorporates scene geometry and physical constraints for more accurate human motion tracking in case of camera motion and non-flat scenes. More precisely, we use a state-of-the-art kinematics estimator to obtain the human pose and a robust SLAM method to capture the dynamic camera trajectory, enabling the recovery of the human pose in the world frame. We then refine the kinematic pose estimate using our scene-aware physics optimizer. From our new benchmark, we found that even state-of-the-art methods struggle with this inherently challenging setting, i.e. a moving camera and non-planar environments, while our method robustly estimates both human and camera poses in world coordinates.

[pdf] [code]


Education

  • 2024 - Now
    PhD Candidate at Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University
  • 2022 - 2024
    Preparatory phase student via the cs@maxplanck program
    Graduate School of Computer Science at Saarland University
  • 2018 - 2022
    BSc. Electrical and Electronics Engineering
    Bilkent University