ASH: Animatable Gaussian Splats for Efficient and Photoreal Human Rendering

Haokai Pang, Heming Zhu, Adam Kortylewski, Christian Theobalt, Marc Habermann; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 1165-1175

Real-time rendering of photorealistic and controllable human avatars stands as a cornerstone in Computer Vision and Graphics. While recent advances in neural implicit rendering have unlocked unprecedented photorealism for digital avatars real-time performance has mostly been demonstrated for static scenes only. To address this we propose ASH an animatable Gaussian splatting approach for photorealistic rendering of dynamic humans in real time. We parameterize the clothed human as animatable 3D Gaussians which can be efficiently splatted into image space to generate the final rendering. However naively learning the Gaussian parameters in 3D space poses a severe challenge in terms of compute. Instead we attach the Gaussians onto a deformable character model and learn their parameters in 2D texture space which allows leveraging efficient 2D convolutional architectures that easily scale with the required number of Gaussians. We benchmark ASH with competing methods on pose-controllable avatars demonstrating that our method outperforms existing real-time methods by a large margin and shows comparable or even better results than offline methods.