Neural Rendering of Humans in Novel View and Pose from Monocular Video
This addresses the challenge of user-controlled human rendering for applications like virtual reality, but it is incremental as it builds on prior neural radiance field techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of generating photo-realistic humans in novel views and poses from monocular video, achieving significant performance improvements over existing methods on datasets like ZJU-MoCap.
We introduce a new method that generates photo-realistic humans under novel views and poses given a monocular video as input. Despite the significant progress recently on this topic, with several methods exploring shared canonical neural radiance fields in dynamic scene scenarios, learning a user-controlled model for unseen poses remains a challenging task. To tackle this problem, we introduce an effective method to a) integrate observations across several frames and b) encode the appearance at each individual frame. We accomplish this by utilizing both the human pose that models the body shape as well as point clouds that partially cover the human as input. Our approach simultaneously learns a shared set of latent codes anchored to the human pose among several frames, and an appearance-dependent code anchored to incomplete point clouds generated by each frame and its predicted depth. The former human pose-based code models the shape of the performer whereas the latter point cloud-based code predicts fine-level details and reasons about missing structures at the unseen poses. To further recover non-visible regions in query frames, we employ a temporal transformer to integrate features of points in query frames and tracked body points from automatically-selected key frames. Experiments on various sequences of dynamic humans from different datasets including ZJU-MoCap show that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches under unseen poses and novel views given monocular videos as input.