COUCH: Towards Controllable Human-Chair Interactions

Xiaohan Zhang, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Sebastian Starke, Vladimir Guzov, Gerard Pons-Moll ;

"Humans can interact with an object in the scene in many different ways, which are often associated with different modalities of contacting with the object. This creates a highly complex motion space that can be difficult to learn, particularly when synthesizing such human interactions in a controllable manner. Existing works on synthesizing human scene interaction focus on the high-level control of interacting with a particular object without considering fine-grained control of limb motion variations within one task. In this work, we drive this direction and study the problem of synthesizing scene interactions conditioned on a wide range of contact positions on the object. We pick human-chair interactions as an example. We propose a novel synthesis framework COUCH, which firstly plans ahead the motion by predicting contact-aware control signals of the hands, which are then used to synthesize contact-conditioned interactions. Furthermore, we contribute a large human-chair interaction dataset with clean annotations, the COUCH Dataset. Our method shows consistent quantitative and qualitative improvements over existing methods for learning human-object interactions."