3D Human Shape Style Transfer

We consider the problem of modifying/replacing the shape style of a real moving character with those of an arbitrary static real source character. Traditional solutions follow a pose transfer strategy, from the moving character to the source character shape, that relies on skeletal pose parametrization. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach that transfers the source shape style onto the moving character. The expected benefit is to avoid the inherently difficult pose to shape conversion required with skeletal parametrization applied on real characters. To this purpose, we consider image style transfer techniques and investigate how to adapt them to 3D human shapes. Adaptive Instance Normalisation (AdaIN) and SPADE architectures have been demonstrated to efficiently and accurately transfer the style of an image onto another while preserving the original image structure. Where AdaIN contributes with a module to perform style transfer through the statistics of the subjects and SPADE contribute with a residual block architecture to refine the quality of the style transfer. We demonstrate that these approaches are extendable to the 3D shape domain by proposing a convolutional neural network that applies the same principle of preserving the shape structure (shape pose) while transferring the style of a new subject shape. The generated results are supervised through a discriminator module to evaluate the realism of the shape, whilst enforcing the decoder to synthesise plausible shapes and improve the style transfer for unseen subjects. Our experiments demonstrate an average of ≈ 56% qualitative and quantitative improvements over the baseline in shape transfer through optimization-based and learning-based methods.