IntrinsicAvatar: Physically Based Inverse Rendering of Dynamic Humans from Monocular Videos via Explicit Ray Tracing

Shaofei Wang, Bozidar Antic, Andreas Geiger, Siyu Tang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 1877-1888

We present IntrinsicAvatar a novel approach to recovering the intrinsic properties of clothed human avatars including geometry albedo material and environment lighting from only monocular videos. Recent advancements in human-based neural rendering have enabled high-quality geometry and appearance reconstruction of clothed humans from just monocular videos. However these methods bake intrinsic properties such as albedo material and environment lighting into a single entangled neural representation. On the other hand only a handful of works tackle the problem of estimating geometry and disentangled appearance properties of clothed humans from monocular videos. They usually achieve limited quality and disentanglement due to approximations of secondary shading effects via learned MLPs. In this work we propose to model secondary shading effects explicitly via Monte-Carlo ray tracing. We model the rendering process of clothed humans as a volumetric scattering process and combine ray tracing with body articulation. Our approach can recover high-quality geometry albedo material and lighting properties of clothed humans from a single monocular video without requiring supervised pre-training using ground truth materials. Furthermore since we explicitly model the volumetric scattering process and ray tracing our model naturally generalizes to novel poses enabling animation of the reconstructed avatar in novel lighting conditions.