Poxture: Human Posture Imitation Using Neural Texture

Human pose imitation, which aims to generate an image with a source character’s appearance, the source character’s shape, and a target character’s posture, has many potential applications in virtual reality, augmented reality, games, movies, etc. It is incredibly challenging due to non-rigid human body motions, significant variations in clothing textures, and self-occluded human bodies in 2D images. In this paper, we propose Poxture, a novel human posture imitation method with neural texture, to address the challenges mentioned above. Concretely, first, we build a dense mapping between a source SMPL human body model (shape and posture) and its corresponding texture (appearance). Then, we apply a neural texture generator to recover the complete texture of the source character. At last, we wrap the source neural texture to the source SMLP model with a target pose to generate the desired image by a GAN model. Poxture does not require any annotations, and our framework can fully disentangle the source character’s appearance, shape, and pose, which enjoys several advantages: 1) It can synthesize high-resolution images with detailed textures, thanks to the learned neural textures containing both visible and invisible parts and high-frequency information; 2) It can imitate complex actions with various appearances and body figures since the complete texture of the source character is acquired. We compare our method with previous methods, showing state-of-the-art results on two challenging benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, given any character, our method can manipulate this avatar imitating arbitrary posture.