Predicting Human Body Shape Under Clothing
Prof. Michale J. Black, Brown University
Abstract
We propose a method to estimate the detailed 3D shape of a person from images of that
person wearing clothing. The approach exploits a model of human body shapes that is learned
from a database of over 2000 range scans. We show that the parameters of this shape model
can be recovered independently of body pose. We further propose a generalization of the visual
hull to account for the fact that observed silhouettes of clothed people do not provide a tight bound
on the true 3D shape. With clothed subjects, different poses provide different constraints on the
possible underlying 3D body shape. We consequently combine constraints across pose to more
accurately estimate 3D body shape in the presence of occluding clothing. Finally we use the recovered
3D shape to estimate the gender of subjects and then employ gender-specific body models to refine
our shape estimates. Results on a novel database of thousands of images of clothed and ``naked''
subjects, as well as sequences from the HumanEva dataset, suggest the method may be accurate
enough for biometric shape analysis in video.
This is joint work with Alexandru Balan.
Project page: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~alb/scapeClothing/
Related ECCV paper: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~black/Papers/balanECCV08.pdf