PointHPS: Cascaded 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation from Point Clouds
This addresses the problem of accurate 3D human modeling from real-world sensor data for applications like robotics and AR/VR, but it is incremental as it builds on existing HPS methods by adapting to point clouds.
The paper tackles 3D human pose and shape estimation from noisy and incomplete point clouds by proposing PointHPS, a cascaded framework that iteratively refines features, and it outperforms state-of-the-art methods by significant margins on large-scale benchmarks.
Human pose and shape estimation (HPS) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. While most existing studies focus on HPS from 2D images or videos with inherent depth ambiguity, there are surging need to investigate HPS from 3D point clouds as depth sensors have been frequently employed in commercial devices. However, real-world sensory 3D points are usually noisy and incomplete, and also human bodies could have different poses of high diversity. To tackle these challenges, we propose a principled framework, PointHPS, for accurate 3D HPS from point clouds captured in real-world settings, which iteratively refines point features through a cascaded architecture. Specifically, each stage of PointHPS performs a series of downsampling and upsampling operations to extract and collate both local and global cues, which are further enhanced by two novel modules: 1) Cross-stage Feature Fusion (CFF) for multi-scale feature propagation that allows information to flow effectively through the stages, and 2) Intermediate Feature Enhancement (IFE) for body-aware feature aggregation that improves feature quality after each stage. To facilitate a comprehensive study under various scenarios, we conduct our experiments on two large-scale benchmarks, comprising i) a dataset that features diverse subjects and actions captured by real commercial sensors in a laboratory environment, and ii) controlled synthetic data generated with realistic considerations such as clothed humans in crowded outdoor scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointHPS, with its powerful point feature extraction and processing scheme, outperforms State-of-the-Art methods by significant margins across the board. Homepage: https://caizhongang.github.io/projects/PointHPS/.