# PIFu for the Real World: A Self-supervised Framework to Reconstruct Dressed Human from Single-view Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.10769 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10769/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [Implicit Geometric Regularization for Learning Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10099/) (2020)
- [Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07372/) (2019)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00452/) (2020)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [Soft Rasterizer: A Differentiable Renderer for Image-based 3D Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01786/) (2019)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [Implicit Functions in Feature Space for 3D Shape Reconstruction and Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01456/) (2020)
- [DISN: Deep Implicit Surface Network for High-quality Single-view 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10711/) (2019)
- [ICON: Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09127/) (2021)
- [Multi-Garment Net: Learning to Dress 3D People from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06903/) (2019)
- [Total Capture: A 3D Deformation Model for Tracking Faces, Hands, and Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01615/) (2018)
- [PaMIR: Parametric Model-Conditioned Implicit Representation for Image-based Human Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03858/) (2020)
- [Learning to Recover 3D Scene Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09365/) (2020)
- [Unite the People: Closing the Loop Between 3D and 2D Human Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02468/) (2017)
- [Neural Body Fitting: Unifying Deep Learning and Model-Based Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05942/) (2018)
- [DeepHuman: 3D Human Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06473/) (2019)
- [DIST: Rendering Deep Implicit Signed Distance Function with Differentiable Sphere Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13225/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Monocular Video Using 3D Geometric Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05522/) (2018)
- [Learning to Regress 3D Face Shape and Expression from an Image without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06817/) (2019)
- [SDFDiff: Differentiable Rendering of Signed Distance Fields for 3D Shape Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07109/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Human as Points: Explicit Point-based 3D Human Reconstruction from Single-view RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02892/) (2023)
- [Investigating Anthropometric Fidelity in SAM 3D Body](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06035/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

It is very challenging to accurately reconstruct sophisticated human geometry caused by various poses and garments from a single image. Recently, works based on pixel-aligned implicit function (PIFu) have made a big step and achieved state-of-the-art fidelity on image-based 3D human digitization. However, the training of PIFu relies heavily on expensive and limited 3D ground truth data (i.e. synthetic data), thus hindering its generalization to more diverse real world images. In this work, we propose an end-to-end self-supervised network named SelfPIFu to utilize abundant and diverse in-the-wild images, resulting in largely improved reconstructions when tested on unconstrained in-the-wild images. At the core of SelfPIFu is the depth-guided volume-/surface-aware signed distance fields (SDF) learning, which enables self-supervised learning of a PIFu without access to GT mesh. The whole framework consists of a normal estimator, a depth estimator, and a SDF-based PIFu and better utilizes extra depth GT during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our self-supervised framework and the superiority of using depth as input. On synthetic data, our Intersection-Over-Union (IoU) achieves to 93.5%, 18% higher compared with PIFuHD. For in-the-wild images, we conduct user studies on the reconstructed results, the selection rate of our results is over 68% compared with other state-of-the-art methods.