Human Appearance Transfer

We propose an automatic person-to-person appearance transfer model based on explicit parametric 3d human representations and learned, constrained deep translation network architectures for photographic image synthesis. Given a single source image and a single target image, each corresponding to different human subjects, wearing different clothing and in different poses, our goal is to photo-realistically transfer the appearance from the source image onto the target image while preserving the target shape and clothing segmentation layout. Our solution to this new problem is formulated in terms of a computational pipeline that combines (1) 3d human pose and body shape estimation from monocular images, (2) identifying 3d surface colors elements (mesh triangles) visible in both images, that can be transferred directly using barycentric procedures, and (3) predicting surface appearance missing in the first image but visible in the second one using deep learning-based image synthesis techniques. Our model achieves promising results as supported by a perceptual user study where the participants rated around 65% of our results as good, very good or perfect, as well in automated tests (Inception scores and a Faster-RCNN human detector responding very similarly to real and model generated images). We further show how the proposed architecture can be profiled to automatically generate images of a person dressed with different clothing transferred from a person in another image, opening paths for applications in entertainment and photo-editing (e.g. embodying and posing as friends or famous actors), the fashion industry, or affordable online shopping of clothing.