We propose VLOGGER, a method for audio-driven human video generation from a single input image of a person, which builds on the success of recent generative diffusion models. Our method consists of 1) a stochastic human-to-3d-motion diffusion model, and 2) a novel diffusion-based architecture that augments text-to-image models with both spatial and temporal controls. This supports the generation of high quality video of variable length, easily controllable through text or speech via high-level representations of human faces and bodies. In contrast to previous work, our method does not require training for each person, does not rely on face detection and cropping, generates the complete image (not just the face or the lips), and considers a broad spectrum of scenarios (e.g. visible torso or diverse subject identities) that are critical to correctly synthesize humans who communicate. We also curate MENTOR, a new and diverse dataset with 3d pose and expression annotations, one order of magnitude larger than previous ones (800,000 identities) and with dynamic gestures, where we train and ablate our main technical contributions. VLOGGER outperforms state-of-the-art methods in three public benchmarks, considering image quality, identity preservation and temporal consistency while also generating upperbody gestures. We analyze the performance of VLOGGER with respect to multiple diversity metrics, showing that our architectural choices and the use of MENTOR benefit training a fair and unbiased model at scale. Finally we show applications in video editing and personalization.

We present SPHEAR, an accurate, differentiable parametric statistical 3D human head model, enabled by a novel 3D registration method based on spherical embeddings. We shift the paradigm away from the classical Non-Rigid Registration methods, which operate under various surface priors, increasing reconstruction fidelity and minimizing required human intervention. Additionally, SPHEAR is a complete model that allows not only to sample diverse synthetic head shapes and facial expressions, but also gaze directions, high-resolution color textures, surface normal maps, and hair cuts represented in detail, as strands. SP-HEAR can be used for automatic realistic visual data generation, semantic annotation, and general reconstruction tasks. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, our components are fast and memory efficient, and experiments support the validity of our design choices and the accuracy of registration, reconstruction and generation techniques.

We present PhoMoH [‘fo℧.mo℧’], a neural network methodology to construct generative models of photorealistic 3D geometry and appearance of human heads including hair, beards, an oral cavity, and clothing. In contrast to prior work, PhoMoH models the human head using neural fields, thus supporting complex topology. Instead of learning a head model from scratch, we propose to augment an existing expressive head model with new features. Concretely, we learn a highly detailed geometry network layered on top of a mid-resolution head model together with a detailed, local geometry-aware, and disentangled color field. Our proposed architecture allows us to learn photorealistic human head models from relatively little data. The learned generative geometry and appearance networks can be sampled individually and enable the creation of diverse and realistic human heads. Extensive experiments validate our method qualitatively and across different metrics.

We present DiffHuman, a probabilistic method for photo-realistic 3D human reconstruction from a single RGB image. Despite the ill-posed nature of this problem, most methods are deterministic and output a single solution, often resulting in a lack of geometric detail and blurriness in unseen or uncertain regions. In contrast, DiffHuman predicts a proba-bility distribution over 3D reconstructions conditioned on an input 2D image, which allows us to sample multiple detailed 3D avatars that are consistent with the image. DiffHuman is implemented as a conditional diffusion model that denoises pixel-aligned 2D observations of an underlying 3D shape representation. During inference, we may sample 3D avatars by iteratively denoising 2D renders of the predicted 3D repre-sentation. Furthermore, we introduce a generator neural net-work that approximates rendering with considerably reduced runtime (55 x speed up), resulting in a novel dual-branch diffusion framework. Our experiments show that DiffHuman can produce diverse and detailed reconstructions for the parts of the person that are unseen or uncertain in the input image, while remaining competitive with the state-of-the-art when reconstructing visible surfaces.

We introduce Structured 3D Features, a model based on a novel implicit 3D representation that pools pixel-aligned image features onto dense 3D points sampled from a parametric, statistical human mesh surface. The 3D points have associated semantics and can move freely in 3D space. This allows for optimal coverage of the person of interest, beyond just the body shape, which in turn, additionally helps modeling accessories, hair, and loose clothing. Owing to this, we present a complete 3D transformer-based attention framework which, given a single image of a person in an unconstrained pose, generates an animatable 3D reconstruction with albedo and illumination decomposition, as a result of a single end-to-end model, trained semi-supervised, and with no additional postprocessing. We show that our S3F model surpasses the previous state-of-the-art on various tasks, including monocular 3D reconstruction, as well as albedo & shading estimation. Moreover, we show that the proposed methodology allows novel view synthesis, relighting, and re-posing the reconstruction, and can naturally be extended to handle multiple input images (e.g. different views of a person, or the same view, in different poses, in video). Finally, we demonstrate the editing capabilities of our model for 3D virtual try-on applications.

We present \emph{DreamHuman}, a method to generate realistic animatable 3D human avatar models entirely from textual descriptions. Recent text-to-3D methods have made considerable strides in generation, but are still lacking in important aspects. Control and often spatial resolution remain limited, existing methods produce fixed rather than 3D human models that can be placed in different poses (i.e. re-posable or animatable), and anthropometric consistency for complex structures like people remains a challenge. \emph{DreamHuman} connects large text-to-image synthesis models, neural radiance fields, and statistical human body models in a novel optimization framework. This makes it possible to generate dynamic 3D human avatars with high-quality textures and learnt per-instance rigid and non rigid geometric deformations. We demonstrate that our method is capable to generate a wide variety of animatable, realistic 3D human models from text. These have diverse appearance, clothing, skin tones and body shapes, and outperform both generic text-to-3D approaches and previous text-based 3D avatar generators in visual fidelity.

We present a new solution to egocentric 3D body pose estimation from monocular images captured from a downward looking fish-eye camera installed on the rim of a head mounted virtual reality device. This unusual viewpoint leads to images with unique visual appearance, characterized by severe self-occlusions and strong perspective distortions that result in a drastic difference in resolution between lower and upper body. We propose a new encoder-decoder architecture with a novel multi-branch decoder designed specifically to account for the varying uncertainty in 2D joint locations. Our quantitative evaluation, both on synthetic and real-world datasets, shows that our strategy leads to substantial improvements in accuracy over state of the art egocentric pose estimation approaches. To tackle the severe lack of labelled training data for egocentric 3D pose estimation we also introduced a large-scale photo-realistic synthetic dataset. xR-EgoPose offers 383K frames of high quality renderings of people with diverse skin tones, body shapes and clothing, in a variety of backgrounds and lighting conditions, performing a range of actions. Our experiments show that the high variability in our new synthetic training corpus leads to good generalization to real world footage and to state of the art results on real world datasets with ground truth. Moreover, an evaluation on the Human3.6M benchmark shows that the performance of our method is on par with top performing approaches on the more classic problem of 3D human pose from a third person viewpoint.

We present PHORHUM, a novel, end-to-end trainable, deep neural network methodology for photorealistic 3D human reconstruction given just a monocular RGB image. Our pixel-aligned method estimates detailed 3D geometry and, for the first time, the unshaded surface color together with the scene illumination. Observing that 3D supervision alone is not sufficient for high fidelity color reconstruction, we introduce patch-based rendering losses that enable reliable color reconstruction on visible parts of the human, and detailed and plausible color estimation for the non-visible parts. Moreover, our method specifically addresses methodological and practical limitations of prior work in terms of representing geometry, albedo, and illumination effects, in an end-to-end model where factors can be effectively disentangled. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate the versatility and robustness of our approach. Our state-of-the-art results validate the method qualitatively and for different metrics, for both geometric and color reconstruction.

We present imGHUM, the first holistic generative model of 3D human shape and articulated pose, represented as a signed distance function. In contrast to prior work, we model the full human body implicitly as a function zero-level-set and without the use of an explicit template mesh. We propose a novel network architecture and a learning paradigm, which make it possible to learn a detailed implicit generative model of human pose, shape, and semantics, on par with state-of-the-art mesh-based models. Our model features desired detail for human models, such as articulated pose including hand motion and facial expressions, a broad spectrum of shape variations, and can be queried at arbitrary resolutions and spatial locations. Additionally, our model has attached spatial semantics making it straightforward to establish correspondences between different shape instances, thus enabling applications that are difficult to tackle using classical implicit representations. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate the model accuracy and its applicability to current research problems.

We present neural radiance fields for rendering and temporal (4D) reconstruction of humans in motion (H-NeRF), as captured by a sparse set of cameras or even from a monocular video. Our approach combines ideas from neural scene representation, novel-view synthesis, and implicit statistical geometric human representations, coupled using novel loss functions. Instead of learning a radiance field with a uniform occupancy prior, we constrain it by a structured implicit human body model, represented using signed distance functions. This allows us to robustly fuse information from sparse views and generalize well beyond the poses or views observed in training. Moreover, we apply geometric constraints to co-learn the structure of the observed subject -- including both body and clothing -- and to regularize the radiance field to geometrically plausible solutions. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the robustness and the accuracy of our approach, its generalization capabilities significantly outside a small training set of poses and views, and statistical extrapolation beyond the observed shape.

While many works focus on 3D reconstruction from images, in this paper, we focus on 3D shape reconstruction and completion from a variety of 3D inputs, which are deficient in some respect: low and high resolution voxels, sparse and dense point clouds, complete or incomplete. Processing of such 3D inputs is an increasingly important problem as they are the output of 3D scanners, which are becoming more accessible, and are the intermediate output of 3D computer vision algorithms. Recently, learned implicit functions have shown great promise as they produce continuous reconstructions. However, we identified two limitations in reconstruction from 3D inputs: 1) details present in the input data are not retained, and 2) poor reconstruction of articulated humans. To solve this, we propose Implicit Feature Networks (IF-Nets), which deliver continuous outputs, can handle multiple topologies, and complete shapes for missing or sparse input data retaining the nice properties of recent learned implicit functions, but critically they can also retain detail when it is present in the input data, and can reconstruct articulated humans. Our work differs from prior work in two crucial aspects. First, instead of using a single vector to encode a 3D shape, we extract a learnable 3-dimensional multi-scale tensor of deep features, which is aligned with the original Euclidean space embedding the shape. Second, instead of classifying x-y-z point coordinates directly, we classify deep features extracted from the tensor at a continuous query point. We show that this forces our model to make decisions based on global and local shape structure, as opposed to point coordinates, which are arbitrary under Euclidean transformations. Experiments demonstrate that IF-Nets outperform prior work in 3D object reconstruction in ShapeNet, and obtain significantly more accurate 3D human reconstructions. Code and project website is available at https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/ifnets/.

In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method to automatically transfer textures of clothing images (front and back) to 3D garments worn on top SMPL, in real time. We first automatically compute training pairs of images with aligned 3D garments using a custom non-rigid 3D to 2D registration method, which is accurate but slow. Using these pairs, we learn a mapping from pixels to the 3D garment surface. Our idea is to learn dense correspondences from garment image silhouettes to a 2D-UV map of a 3D garment surface using shape information alone, completely ignoring texture, which allows us to generalize to the wide range of web images. Several experiments demonstrate that our model is more accurate than widely used baselines such as thin-plate-spline warping and image-to-image translation networks while being orders of magnitude faster. Our model opens the door for applications such as virtual try-on, and allows for generation of 3D humans with varied textures which is necessary for learning. Code will be available at https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/pix2surf/.

We present Octopus, a learning-based model to infer the personalized 3D shape of people from a few frames (1-8) of a monocular video in which the person is moving with a reconstruction accuracy of 4 to 5mm, while being orders of magnitude faster than previous methods. From semantic segmentation images, our Octopus model reconstructs a 3D shape, including the parameters of SMPL plus clothing and hair in 10 seconds or less. The model achieves fast and accurate predictions based on two key design choices. First, by predicting shape in a canonical T-pose space, the network learns to encode the images of the person into pose-invariant latent codes, where the information is fused. Second, based on the observation that feed-forward predictions are fast but do not always align with the input images, we predict using both, bottom-up and top-down streams (one per view) allowing information to flow in both directions. Learning relies only on synthetic 3D data. Once learned, Octopus can take a variable number of frames as input, and is able to reconstruct shapes even from a single image with an accuracy of 5mm. Results on 3 different datasets demonstrate the efficacy and accuracy of our approach.

We present a simple yet effective method to infer detailed full human body shape from only a single photograph. Our model can infer full-body shape including face, hair, and clothing including wrinkles at interactive frame-rates. Results feature details even on parts that are occluded in the input image. Our main idea is to turn shape regression into an aligned image-to-image translation problem. The input to our method is a partial texture map of the visible region obtained from off-the-shelf methods. From a partial texture, we estimate detailed normal and vector displacement maps, which can be applied to a low-resolution smooth body model to add detail and clothing. Despite being trained purely with synthetic data, our model generalizes well to real-world photographs. Numerous results demonstrate the versatility and robustness of our method.

We present a novel method for high detail-preserving human avatar creation from monocular video. A parameterized body model is refined and optimized to maximally resemble subjects from a video showing them from all sides. Our avatars feature a natural face, hairstyle, clothes with garment wrinkles, and high-resolution texture. Our paper contributes facial landmark and shading-based human body shape refinement, a semantic texture prior, and a novel texture stitching strategy, resulting in the most sophisticated-looking human avatars obtained from a single video to date. Numerous results show the robustness and versatility of our method. A user study illustrates its superiority over the state-of-the-art in terms of identity preservation, level of detail, realism, and overall user preference.

This paper describes a method to obtain accurate 3D body models and texture of arbitrary people from a single, monocular video in which a person is moving. Based on a parametric body model, we present a robust processing pipeline to infer 3D model shapes including clothed people with 4.5mm reconstruction accuracy. At the core of our approach is the transformation of dynamic body pose into a canonical frame of reference. Our main contribution is a method to transform the silhouette cones corresponding to dynamic human silhouettes to obtain a visual hull in a common reference frame. This enables efficient estimation of a consensus 3D shape, texture and implanted animation skeleton based on a large number of frames. Results on 4 different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to produce accurate 3D models. Requiring only an RGB camera, our method enables everyone to create their own fully animatable digital double, e.g., for social VR applications or virtual try-on for online fashion shopping.