Tao Hu (胡涛)

Postdoc Research Fellow,
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Ph.D., Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Email: tao.hu [at] ntu.edu.sg, taohu [at] umd.edu

Resume/CV | Google Scholar | GitHub | Twitter

Biography

I am a Postdoc Research Fellow at NTU, working with Prof. Ziwei Liu. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park with my advisor Prof. Matthias Zwicker (CS Department Chair). During my PhD, I had the pleasure to visit the Max Planck Institute in Saarbrücken, Germany under the guidance of Prof. Christian Theobalt in 2020, and 3DV Lab at Tsinghua University, China under the guidance of Prof. Yebin Liu in 2021. Before that, I received my B.Eng. and M.S. degree from the School of Software, Beijing Institute of Technology in 2015 and 2018 respectively.

Research Interest

My research focus is on the intersection of artificial intelligence, computer vision and graphics, with the goal of creating digital media for next generation AR/VR and graphics applications. This includes algorithms to create 3D virtual human avatars with limited data (e.g., videos) that are photorealistic and fully controllable (pose, shape, viewpoints, etc.), neural rendering, 3D representation and reconstruction, 3D content creation, and 3D human motion capture / animation.

Research Experience

SCSE, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Research Fellow, Jun. 2023 ~ present

Supervisor: Prof. Ziwei Liu

Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

Supervisor: Prof. Matthias Zwicker

Ph.D., Aug. 2018 ~ Jun. 2023

3DV Lab, Tshinghua University, Beijing, China

Research Intern, Apr. 2021 ~ Nov. 2021

Supervisor: Prof. Yebin Liu

Graphics, Vision & Video Group, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany

Research Intern, Mar. 2020 ~ Sep. 2020

Supervisor: Prof. Christian Theobalt

Shanghai AI Lab, Shanghai, China

Research Intern, Apr. 2023 ~ Jun. 2023

Supervisor: Prof. Ziwei Liu

Intelligent Creation Lab, ByteDance Inc USA, Remote

Research Intern, Dec. 2021 ~ Jul. 2022

Supervisor: Dr. Hongyi Xu, Dr. Linjie Luo

Speech Group, Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), Beijing, China

Research Intern, Jun. 2017 - Nov. 2017

Supervisor: Dr. Kai Chen

Preprint

 

StructLDM: Structured Latent Diffusion for 3D Human Generation.

Tao Hu, Fangzhou Hong, Ziwei Liu.
arXiv:2404.01241, 2024
[Project Page] [Video] [Code] [arXiv]
A new paradigm for 3D human generation from 2D image collections, with 3 key designs: a structured 2D latent space, a structural autodecoder, and a structured latent diffusion model.

 

FashionEngine: Interactive Generation and Editing of 3D Clothed Humans.

Tao Hu, Fangzhou Hong, Zhaoxi Chen, Ziwei Liu.
arXiv:2404.01655, 2024
[Project Page] [Video] [arXiv]
The first work that constructs an interactive 3D human generation and editing system with multimodal control (e.g., texts, images, hand-drawing sketches) in a unified framework.

 

HumanLiff: Layer-wise 3D Human Generation with Diffusion Model.

Shoukang Hu, Fangzhou Hong, Tao Hu , Liang Pan, Weiye Xiao, Haiyi Mei, Lei Yang, Ziwei Liu
arXiv:2308.09712, 2023
[Paper] [Project Page] [Code]
A diffusion-based approach for layer-wise 3D human generation.

Selected Publications

 

SurMo: Surface-based 4D Motion Modeling for Dynamic Human Rendering.

Tao Hu, Fangzhou Hong, Ziwei Liu.
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recogntion (CVPR 2024)
[Paper] [Project Page] [Video] [Code]
A new paradigm for learning dynamic human rendering from videos by jointly modeling the temporal motion dynamics and human appearances in a unified framework based on a novel surface-based triplane.

 

HVTR++: Image and Pose Driven Human Avatars using Hybrid Volumetric-Textural Rendering.

Tao Hu, Hongyi Xu, Linjie Luo, Tao Yu, Zerong Zheng, He Zhang, Yebin Liu, Matthias Zwicker.
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG 2023)
[Paper] [Project Page] [Video] [Code]
A virtual teleportation system using sparse view cameras based on a novel texel-aligned multimodal representation.

 

HVTR: Hybrid Volumetric-Textural Rendering for Human Avatars.

Tao Hu, Tao Yu, Zerong Zheng, He Zhang, Yebin Liu, Matthias Zwicker.
International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV 2022)
[Paper] [Project Page] [Video] [Poster] [arXiv] [Code]
The first work that combines classical volumetric rendering with probabilistic generative models for efficient and realistic dynamic human rendering.

 

EgoRenderer: Rendering Human Avatars from Egocentric Camera Images.

Tao Hu, Kripasindhu Sarkar, Lingjie Liu, Matthias Zwicker, Christian Theobalt.
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2021)
[Paper] [Project Page] [Video] [Poster] [arXiv]
A mobile virtual teleportation system integrating mobile motion capture and free-view rendering in a egocentric setup.

 

Learning to Generate Dense Point Clouds with Textures on Multiple Categories.

Tao Hu, Geng Lin, Zhizhong Han, Matthias Zwicker.
IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2021)
[Paper] [Code] [arXiv]
Extend the multi-view representation for generalizable geometry/texture reconstructions from single RGB images.

 

3D Shape Completion with Multi-view Consistent Inference.

Tao Hu, Zhizhong Han, Matthias Zwicker.
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020, Oral)
[Paper] [Code] [arXiv]
Introduce a self-supervised multi-view consistent inference technique to enforce geometric consistency for multi-view representation.

 

Render4Completion: Synthesizing Multi-view Depth Maps for 3D Shape Completion.

Tao Hu, Zhizhong Han, Abhinav Shrivastava, Matthias Zwicker.
IEEE ICCV Geometry Meets Deep Learning Workshop (ICCVW 2019, Oral)
[Paper] [Code] [arXiv]
Present multi-view based 3D shape representation with a multi-view completion net for dense 3D shape completion.

 

A Parallel Video Player Plugin for CryEngine.

Tao Hu, Gangyi Ding, Lijie Li, Longfei Zhang.
Highlights of Sciencepaper, Chinese Journal, May 2016.
Software Copyright (2016SR010412) [Paper]
Propose a parallel video player plugin for CryEngine3 for a speedup from 16 FPS to 54 FPS at a large-scale virtual stage with 40 LED screens playing videos simultaneously for digital performance.

Services

Conference Reviewer: ECCV 2022, 2024, 3DV 2022, WACV 2022, 2023, 2024, CVPR 2023, 2024, ICCV 2023, ICPR 2024, ACCV 2024
Journal Reviewer: Computer Graphics Forum, Image and Vision Computing, Pattern Recognition Letters

Selected Awards & Honors

Graduate National Scholarship (Top 2%), Ministry of Education of China                2016
Undergraduate National Scholarship (Top 2%), Ministry of Education of China      2014

Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistant, Dept. of Computer Science, UMD.
  • CMSC425 Game Programming (Prof. Roger Eastman), Fall 2019
  • CMSC425 Game Programming (Prof. Roger Eastman), Spring 2019
  • CMSC 216 Introduction to Computer Systems (Mr. Laurence Herman), Fall 2018