Dynamic Appearance Modeling of Clothed 3D Human Avatars using a Single Camera
This work addresses the challenge of creating realistic 3D avatars from single-camera videos for applications in animation and virtual reality, representing a novel method for a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling clothed 3D human avatars from monocular video by addressing motion ambiguity, where existing methods struggle with dynamic movements, and introduces a compositional framework combining explicit and implicit modeling to generate avatars with motion-dependent geometry and texture, resulting in physically plausible secondary motion.
The appearance of a human in clothing is driven not only by the pose but also by its temporal context, i.e., motion. However, such context has been largely neglected by existing monocular human modeling methods whose neural networks often struggle to learn a video of a person with large dynamics due to the motion ambiguity, i.e., there exist numerous geometric configurations of clothes that are dependent on the context of motion even for the same pose. In this paper, we introduce a method for high-quality modeling of clothed 3D human avatars using a video of a person with dynamic movements. The main challenge comes from the lack of 3D ground truth data of geometry and its temporal correspondences. We address this challenge by introducing a novel compositional human modeling framework that takes advantage of both explicit and implicit human modeling. For explicit modeling, a neural network learns to generate point-wise shape residuals and appearance features of a 3D body model by comparing its 2D rendering results and the original images. This explicit model allows for the reconstruction of discriminative 3D motion features from UV space by encoding their temporal correspondences. For implicit modeling, an implicit network combines the appearance and 3D motion features to decode high-fidelity clothed 3D human avatars with motion-dependent geometry and texture. The experiments show that our method can generate a large variation of secondary motion in a physically plausible way.