Human body shape reconstruction from binary silhouette images

Abstract 3D content creation is referred to as one of the most fundamental tasks of computer graphics. And many 3D modeling algorithms from 2D images or curves have been developed over the past several decades. Designers are allowed to align some conceptual images or sketch some suggestive curves, from front, side, and top views, and then use them as references in constructing a 3D model manually or semi-automatically. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based reconstruction of 3D human body shape from 2D orthographic silhouette images. A CNN-based regression network, with two branches corresponding to frontal and lateral views respectively, is designed for estimating 3D human body shape from binary silhouette images. We train our networks separately to decouple the feature descriptors which encode the body parameters from different views, and fuse them to estimate an accurate human body shape. In addition, to overcome the shortage of training data required for this purpose, we propose some significantly data augmentation schemes for 3D human body shapes, which can be used to promote further research on this topic. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that visually realistic and accurate reconstructions can be achieved effectively using our algorithm. Requiring only one or two silhouette images, our method can help users create their own digital avatars quickly, and also make it easy to create digital human body for 3D game, virtual reality, online fashion shopping.