Neural Capture and Synthesis Conference Paper 2021

Neural Parametric Models for 3D Deformable Shapes

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Parametric 3D models have enabled a wide variety of tasks in computer graphics and vision, such as modeling human bodies, faces, and hands. However, the construction of these parametric models is often tedious, as it requires heavy manual tweaking, and they struggle to represent additional complexity and details such as wrinkles or clothing. To this end, we propose Neural Parametric Models (NPMs), a novel, learned alternative to traditional, parametric 3D models, which does not require hand-crafted, object-specific constraints. In particular, we learn to disentangle 4D dynamics into latent-space representations of shape and pose, leveraging the flexibility of recent developments in learned implicit functions. Crucially, once learned, our neural parametric models of shape and pose enable optimization over the learned spaces to fit to new observations, similar to the fitting of a traditional parametric model, e.g., SMPL. This enables NPMs to achieve a significantly more accurate and detailed representation of observed deformable sequences. We show that NPMs improve notably over both parametric and non-parametric state of the art in reconstruction and tracking of monocular depth sequences of clothed humans and hands. Latent-space interpolation as well as shape/pose transfer experiments further demonstrate the usefulness of NPMs.

Author(s): Pablo Palafox and Aljaz Bozic and Justus Thies and Matthias Nießner and Angela Dai
Book Title: 2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2021)
Pages: 12675--12685
Year: 2021
Month: October
Publisher: IEEE
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)
DOI: 10.1109/ICCV48922.2021.01246
Event Name: IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2021)
Event Place: virtual (originally Montreal, Canada)
State: Published
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
ISBN: 978-1-6654-2812-5

BibTex

@inproceedings{palafox2021npm,
  title = {Neural Parametric Models for 3D Deformable Shapes},
  booktitle = {2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2021) },
  abstract = {Parametric 3D models have enabled a wide variety of tasks in computer graphics and vision, such as modeling human bodies, faces, and hands. However, the construction of these parametric models is often tedious, as it requires heavy manual tweaking, and they struggle to represent additional complexity and details such as wrinkles or clothing. To this end, we propose Neural Parametric Models (NPMs), a novel, learned alternative to traditional, parametric 3D models, which does not require hand-crafted, object-specific constraints. In particular, we learn to disentangle 4D dynamics into latent-space representations of shape and pose, leveraging the flexibility of recent developments in learned implicit functions. Crucially, once learned, our neural parametric models of shape and pose enable optimization over the learned spaces to fit to new observations, similar to the fitting of a traditional parametric model, e.g., SMPL. This enables NPMs to achieve a significantly more accurate and detailed representation of observed deformable sequences. We show that NPMs improve notably over both parametric and non-parametric state of the art in reconstruction and tracking of monocular depth sequences of clothed humans and hands. Latent-space interpolation as well as shape/pose transfer experiments further demonstrate the usefulness of NPMs.},
  pages = {12675--12685 },
  publisher = {IEEE},
  month = oct,
  year = {2021},
  slug = {palafox2021npm},
  author = {Palafox, Pablo and Bozic, Aljaz and Thies, Justus and Nie{\ss}ner, Matthias and Dai, Angela},
  month_numeric = {10}
}