Weakly-supervised 3D Pose Transfer with Keypoints
This addresses the challenge of transferring poses between 3D meshes with different topologies for applications in animation and graphics, though it is incremental as it builds on existing keypoint and inverse kinematics techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of 3D pose transfer without paired training data by proposing a weakly-supervised keypoint-based framework, achieving superior performance compared to state-of-the-art unsupervised methods and comparable results to fully supervised approaches on benchmark datasets.
The main challenges of 3D pose transfer are: 1) Lack of paired training data with different characters performing the same pose; 2) Disentangling pose and shape information from the target mesh; 3) Difficulty in applying to meshes with different topologies. We thus propose a novel weakly-supervised keypoint-based framework to overcome these difficulties. Specifically, we use a topology-agnostic keypoint detector with inverse kinematics to compute transformations between the source and target meshes. Our method only requires supervision on the keypoints, can be applied to meshes with different topologies and is shape-invariant for the target which allows extraction of pose-only information from the target meshes without transferring shape information. We further design a cycle reconstruction to perform self-supervised pose transfer without the need for ground truth deformed mesh with the same pose and shape as the target and source, respectively. We evaluate our approach on benchmark human and animal datasets, where we achieve superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches and even comparable performance with the fully supervised approaches. We test on the more challenging Mixamo dataset to verify our approach's ability in handling meshes with different topologies and complex clothes. Cross-dataset evaluation further shows the strong generalization ability of our approach.