DiffHuman: Probabilistic Photorealistic 3D Reconstruction of Humans

Akash Sengupta, Thiemo Alldieck, Nikos Kolotouros, Enric Corona, Andrei Zanfir, Cristian Sminchisescu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 1439-1449

We present DiffHuman a probabilistic method for photorealistic 3D human reconstruction from a single RGB image. Despite the ill-posed nature of this problem most methods are deterministic and output a single solution often resulting in a lack of geometric detail and blurriness in unseen or uncertain regions. In contrast DiffHuman predicts a probability distribution over 3D reconstructions conditioned on an input 2D image which allows us to sample multiple detailed 3D avatars that are consistent with the image. DiffHuman is implemented as a conditional diffusion model that denoises pixel-aligned 2D observations of an underlying 3D shape representation. During inference we may sample 3D avatars by iteratively denoising 2D renders of the predicted 3D representation. Furthermore we introduce a generator neural network that approximates rendering with considerably reduced runtime (55x speed up) resulting in a novel dual-branch diffusion framework. Our experiments show that DiffHuman can produce diverse and detailed reconstructions for the parts of the person that are unseen or uncertain in the input image while remaining competitive with the state-of-the-art when reconstructing visible surfaces.