Recent breakthroughs in video generation, powered by large-scale datasets and diffusion techniques, have shown that video diffusion models can function as implicit 4D novel view synthesizers. Nevertheless, current methods primarily concentrate on redirecting camera trajectory within the front view while struggling to generate 360-degree viewpoint changes. In this paper, we focus on human-centric subdomain and present MV-Performer, an innovative framework for creating synchronized novel view videos from monocular full-body captures. To achieve a 360-degree synthesis, we extensively leverage the MVHumanNet dataset and incorporate an informative condition signal. Specifically, we use the camera-dependent normal maps rendered from oriented partial point clouds, which effectively alleviate the ambiguity between seen and unseen observations. To maintain synchronization in the generated videos, we propose a multi-view human-centric video diffusion model that fuses information from the reference video, partial rendering, and different viewpoints. Additionally, we provide a robust inference procedure for in-the-wild video cases, which greatly mitigates the artifacts induced by imperfect monocular depth estimation. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate our MV-Performer’s state-of-the-art effectiveness and robustness, setting a strong model for human-centric 4D novel view synthesis. Code is available at https://github.com/zyhbili/MV-Performer.

Efficient and accurate reconstruction of a relightable, dynamic clothed human avatar from a monocular video is crucial for the entertainment industry. This article presents SGIA (Surfel-based Gaussian Inverse Avatar), which introduces efficient training and rendering for relightable dynamic human reconstruction. SGIA advances previous Gaussian Avatar methods by comprehensively modeling Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) properties for clothed human avatars, allowing for the manipulation of avatars into novel poses under diverse lighting conditions. Specifically, our approach integrates pre-integration and image-based lighting for fast light calculations that surpass the performance of existing implicit-based techniques. To address challenges related to material lighting disentanglement and accurate geometry reconstruction, we propose an innovative occlusion approximation strategy and a progressive training approach. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SGIA not only achieves highly accurate physical properties but also significantly enhances the realistic relighting of dynamic human avatars, providing a substantial speed advantage.

In recent years, significant progress has been witnessed in the field of neural 3D avatar reconstruction. Among all related tasks, building an animatable avatar from monocular videos is one of the most challenging ones, yet it also has a wide range of applications. The "animatable" means that we need to transfer any arbitrary and unseen poses onto the avatar and generate new 3D videos. Thanks to the rise of the powerful representation of NeRF, generating a high-fidelity animatable avatar from videos has become easier and more accessible. Despite their impressive visual results, the substantial training and rendering overhead dramatically hamper their applications. 3D Gaussian Splatting, as a timely new representation, has demonstrated its high-quality and high-efficiency rendering. This has led to many concurrent works to introduce 3D-GS to animatable avatar building. Although they demonstrate very high-fidelity renderings for poses similar to the training video frames, poor results are produced when the poses are far from training. We argue that this is primarily because the Gaussian points lack structures. Thus, we suggest involving DMTet to represent the coarse geometry of the avatar. In our representation, the majority of Gaussian points are bound to the mesh vertices, while some free Gaussian is allowed to expand to better fit the given video. Furthermore, we develop a dual-space optimization framework to jointly optimize the DMTet, Gaussian points, and skinning weights under two spaces. In this sense, Gaussian points are transformed in a constrained way, which dramatically improves the generalization ability for unseen poses. This is well demonstrated via extensive experiments.

Video generation and editing, particularly human-centric video editing, has seen a surge of interest in its potential to create immersive and dynamic content. A fundamental challenge is ensuring temporal coherence and visual harmony across frames, especially in handling large-scale human motion and maintaining consistency over long sequences. The previous methods, such as zero-shot text-to-video methods with diffusion model, struggle with flickering and length limitations. In contrast, methods employing Video-2D representations grapple with accurately capturing complex structural relationships in large-scale human motion. Simultaneously, some patterns on the human body appear intermittently throughout the video, posing a knotty problem in identifying visual correspondence. To address the above problems, we present HeroMaker. This human-centric video editing framework manipulates the person's appearance within the input video and achieves consistent results across frames. Specifically, we propose to learn the motion priors, which represent the correspondences between dual canonical fields and each video frame, by leveraging the body mesh-based human motion warping and neural deformation-based margin refinement in the video reconstruction framework to ensure the semantic correctness of canonical fields. HeroMaker performs human-centric video editing by manipulating the dual canonical fields and combining them with motion priors to synthesize temporally coherent and visually plausible results. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses existing methods regarding temporal consistency, visual quality, and semantic coherence.

Gestures are non-verbal but important behaviors accompanying people’s speech. While previous methods are able to generate speech rhythm-synchronized gestures, the semantic context of the speech is generally lacking in the gesticulations. Although semantic gestures do not occur very regularly in human speech, they are indeed the key for the audience to understand the speech context in a more immersive environment. Hence, we introduce LivelySpeaker, a framework that realizes semantics-aware co-speech gesture generation and offers several control handles. In particular, our method decouples the task into two stages: script-based gesture generation and audio-guided rhythm refinement. Specifically, the script-based gesture generation leverages the pre-trained CLIP text embeddings as the guidance for generating gestures that are highly semantically aligned with the script. Then, we devise a simple but effective diffusion-based gesture generation backbone simply using pure MLPs, that is conditioned on only audio signals and learns to gesticulate with realistic motions. We utilize such powerful prior to rhyme the script-guided gestures with the audio signals, notably in a zero-shot setting. Our novel two-stage generation framework also enables several applications, such as changing the gesticulation style, editing the co-speech gestures via textual prompting, and controlling the semantic awareness and rhythm alignment with guided diffusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework over competing methods. In addition, our core diffusion-based generative model also achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmarks. The code and model will be released to facilitate future research.

Modeling the human body in a canonical space is a common practice for capturing and animation. But when involving the neural radiance field (NeRF), learning a static NeRF in the canonical space is not enough because the lighting of the body changes when the person moves even though the scene lighting is constant. Previous methods alleviate the inconsistency of lighting by learning a per-frame em-bedding, but this operation does not generalize to unseen poses. Given that the lighting condition is static in the world space while the human body is consistent in the canonical space, we propose a dual-space NeRF that models the scene lighting and the human body with two MLPs in two separate spaces. To bridge these two spaces, previous methods mostly rely on the linear blend skinning (LBS) algorithm. However, the blending weights for LBS of a dynamic neural field are intractable and thus are usually memorized with another MLP, which does not generalize to novel poses. Although it is possible to borrow the blending weights of a parametric mesh such as SMPL, the interpolation operation introduces more artifacts. In this paper, we propose to use the barycentric mapping, which can directly generalize to unseen poses and surprisingly achieves superior results than LBS with neural blending weights. Quantitative and qualitative results on the Human3.6M and the ZJU-MoCap datasets show the effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zyhbili/Dual-Space-NeRF.

Co-speech gesture generation is to synthesize a gesture sequence that not only looks real but also matches with the input speech audio. Our method generates the movements of a complete upper body, including arms, hands, and the head. Although recent data-driven methods achieve great success, challenges still exist, such as limited variety, poor fidelity, and lack of objective metrics. Motivated by the fact that the speech cannot fully determine the gesture, we design a method that learns a set of gesture template vectors to model the latent conditions, which relieve the ambiguity. For our method, the template vector determines the general appearance of a generated gesture sequence, while the speech audio drives subtle movements of the body, both indispensable for synthesizing a realistic gesture sequence. Due to the intractability of an objective metric for gesturespeech synchronization, we adopt the lip-sync error as a proxy metric to tune and evaluate the synchronization ability of our model. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our method in both objective and subjective evaluations on fidelity and synchronization.1