Photo Wake-Up: 3D Character Animation from a Single Photo
This addresses the challenge of creating 3D animations from static images for applications in entertainment, AR, and art, representing a novel application rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of animating a human subject from a single photo, enabling 3D character animation such as walking or jumping, and demonstrates results through human studies and interactive applications.
We present a method and application for animating a human subject from a single photo. E.g., the character can walk out, run, sit, or jump in 3D. The key contributions of this paper are: 1) an application of viewing and animating humans in single photos in 3D, 2) a novel 2D warping method to deform a posable template body model to fit the person's complex silhouette to create an animatable mesh, and 3) a method for handling partial self occlusions. We compare to state-of-the-art related methods and evaluate results with human studies. Further, we present an interactive interface that allows re-posing the person in 3D, and an augmented reality setup where the animated 3D person can emerge from the photo into the real world. We demonstrate the method on photos, posters, and art.