MetaAvatar: Learning Animatable Clothed Human Models from Few Depth Images


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Date

2021

Publication Type

Conference Paper

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

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Data

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to create generalizable and controllable neural signed distance fields (SDFs) that represent clothed humans from monocular depth observations. Recent advances in deep learning, especially neural implicit representations, have enabled human shape reconstruction and controllable avatar generation from different sensor inputs. However, to generate realistic cloth deformations from novel input poses, watertight meshes or dense full-body scans are usually needed as inputs. Furthermore, due to the difficulty of effectively modeling pose-dependent cloth deformations for diverse body shapes and cloth types, existing approaches resort to per-subject/cloth-type optimization from scratch, which is computationally expensive. In contrast, we propose an approach that can quickly generate realistic clothed human avatars, represented as controllable neural SDFs, given only monocular depth images. We achieve this by using meta-learning to learn an initialization of a hypernetwork that predicts the parameters of neural SDFs. The hypernetwork is conditioned on human poses and represents a clothed neural avatar that deforms non-rigidly according to the input poses. Meanwhile, it is meta-learned to effectively incorporate priors of diverse body shapes and cloth types and thus can be much faster to fine-tune, compared to models trained from scratch. We qualitatively and quantitatively show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches that require complete meshes as inputs while our approach requires only depth frames as inputs and runs orders of magnitudes faster. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our meta-learned hypernetwork is very robust, being the first to generate avatars with realistic dynamic cloth deformations given as few as 8 monocular depth frames.

Publication status

published

Book title

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34

Journal / series

Volume

Pages / Article No.

2810 - 2822

Publisher

Curran

Event

35th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021)

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Organisational unit

09686 - Tang, Siyu / Tang, Siyu check_circle

Notes

Conference lecture held at the poster session on December 7, 2021

Funding

204840 - Learning to Create Realistic Human Avatars (SNF)

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