I got my PhD in 3D scene understanding @ The University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Prof. Bob Fisher.
I'm currently a Research Scientist @ MPI working in Michael Black's group on the intersection between digital humans, generative models and machine learning. Previously, I worked @ Microsoft Mixed Reality, Cambridge, UK, under the supervision of Tadas Baltrušaitis on egocentric pose estimation for XR devices.

work


Generative Zoo

Tomasz Niewiadomski, Anastasios Yiannakidis, Hanz Cuevas-Velasquez, Soubhik Sanyal, Michael J. Black,  Silvia Zuffi, Peter Kulits

We propose a pipeline for the scalable generation of realistic 3D animal pose and shape estimation training data. Training solely on data produced using our pipeline, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on a real-world 3D pose and shape estimation benchmark.
Paper



Toward Human Understanding with Controllable Synthesis

Hanz Cuevas-Velasquez,  Priyanka Patel, Haiwen Feng, Michael Black

we design a controllable synthesis method that effectively balances image realism with precise ground truth. We use this to create the Generative BEDLAM (Gen-B) dataset, which improves the realism of the existing synthetic BEDLAM dataset while preserving ground truth accuracy.
Paper



Novel Head Pose, Expression, and Gaze Synthesis

Hanz Cuevas-Velasquez

Our method enables the synthesis of novel head poses, expressions, and gazes from short cellphone videos. It allows for explicit control of the eye and jaw positions, as well as the rendering of new poses and expressions.



Procedural Humans for Computer Vision

Charlie Hewitt, Tadas Baltrušaitis, Erroll Wood, Lohit Petikam, Louis Florentin, Hanz Cuevas Velasquez

Part of my work at Microsoft. A report where we describe how we construct a parametric model of the face and body, including articulated hands; our rendering pipeline to generate realistic images of humans based on this body model; and a method for fitting our body model to dense landmarks predicted from multiple views.
Project page



Two Heads are Better than One: Geometric-Latent Attention for Point Cloud Segmentation

Hanz Cuevas-Velasquez, Antonio Javier Gallego, Robert B. Fisher

An innovative two-headed attention layer that combines geometric and latent features to segment a 3D scene into semantically meaningful subsets. Each head combines local and global information, using either the geometric or latent features, of a neighborhood of points and uses this information to learn better local relationships.
Paper


Real-time Stereo Visual Servoing for Rose Pruning with Robotic Arm

Hanz Cuevas-Velasquez, Antonio-Javier Gallego, Radim Tylecek, Jochen Hemming, Bart Van Tuijl, Angelo Mencarelli, Robert B. Fisher

Visual servoing to find and cut rose branches in real-time in a real garden using a robotic arm and eye-in-hand stereo camera. 
Paper


Segmentation and 3D Reconstruction of Rose Plants from Stereoscopic Images

H Cuevas-Velasquez, AJ Gallego, RB Fisher

Part of the vision module of a garden robot capable of navigating towards rose bushes and clip them according to a set of pruning rules. The method is responsible for performing the segmentation of the branches and recovering their morphology in 3D. 
Paper


Hybrid Multi-camera Visual Servoing to Moving Target

Hanz Cuevas-Velasquez, Nanbo Li, Radim Tylecek, Marcelo Saval-Calvo, Robert B. Fisher

A novel hybrid multi-camera eye-to-hand (EtoH) / eye-in-hand (EinH) approach to guide a robotarm in different tasks. The target point is assumed to bedynamic, which makes the problem more complex in termsof the switching between EtoH and EinH servoing as thespatial relationship between the robot and target changes.
Paper

Short CV


- (2023-Now) Research Scientist @ Michael Black's group

Max Planck Institute - Tuebingen

- (2023) Visiting researcher

   The University of Edinburgh

- (2022 - 2022) Researcher intern

    Microsoft

- (2017 - 2022) Ph.D. in Informatics - 3D Computer Vision

   The University of Edinburgh

- (2017- 2016) MSc. Artificial Intelligence 

   The University of Edinburgh

- (2011- 2015) BSc. Mechatronics Engineering

   Universidad Catolica Boliviana "San Pablo"