# SplatArmor: Articulated Gaussian splatting for animatable humans from monocular RGB videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10812 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10812/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2023.

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

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Deformable 3D Gaussians for High-Fidelity Monocular Dynamic Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13101/) (2023)
- [Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09713/) (2023)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [Neural Fields in Visual Computing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11426/) (2021)
- [PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00452/) (2020)
- [HumanNeRF: Free-viewpoint Rendering of Moving People from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04127/) (2022)
- [Neural 3D Mesh Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07566/) (2017)
- [Soft Rasterizer: A Differentiable Renderer for Image-based 3D Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01786/) (2019)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [ICON: Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09127/) (2021)
- [PyMAF: 3D Human Pose and Shape Regression with Pyramidal Mesh Alignment Feedback Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16507/) (2021)
- [NeuMan: Neural Human Radiance Field from a Single Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12575/) (2022)
- [Video Based Reconstruction of 3D People Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04758/) (2018)
- [A-NeRF: Articulated Neural Radiance Fields for Learning Human Shape, Appearance, and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06199/) (2021)
- [PaMIR: Parametric Model-Conditioned Implicit Representation for Image-based Human Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03858/) (2020)
- [I M Avatar: Implicit Morphable Head Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07471/) (2021)
- [SNARF: Differentiable Forward Skinning for Animating Non-Rigid Neural Implicit Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03953/) (2021)
- [Monocular, One-stage, Regression of Multiple 3D People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12272/) (2020)
- [Neural Articulated Radiance Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03110/) (2021)
- [SelfRecon: Self Reconstruction Your Digital Avatar from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12792/) (2022)
- [Putting People in their Place: Monocular Regression of 3D People in Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08274/) (2021)
- [ARAH: Animatable Volume Rendering of Articulated Human SDFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10036/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02069/) (2023)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03890/) (2024)
- [3DGS-Avatar: Animatable Avatars via Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09228/) (2023)
- [GauHuman: Articulated Gaussian Splatting from Monocular Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02973/) (2023)
- [Recent Advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11134/) (2024)
- [Human Gaussian Splatting: Real-time Rendering of Animatable Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17113/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian as a New Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07181/) (2024)
- [CG-SLAM: Efficient Dense RGB-D SLAM in a Consistent Uncertainty-aware 3D Gaussian Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16095/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Splatting: 3D Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis, a Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03417/) (2024)
- [Generalizable Human Gaussians for Sparse View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12777/) (2024)
- [HAHA: Highly Articulated Gaussian Human Avatars with Textured Mesh Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01053/) (2024)
- [Robust Dual Gaussian Splatting for Immersive Human-centric Volumetric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08353/) (2024)
- [Expressive Gaussian Human Avatars from Monocular RGB Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03204/) (2024)
- [UV Gaussians: Joint Learning of Mesh Deformation and Gaussian Textures for Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11589/) (2024)
- [iHuman: Instant Animatable Digital Humans From Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11174/) (2024)
- [Real-time High-fidelity Gaussian Human Avatars with Position-based Interpolation of Spatially Distributed MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12909/) (2025)
- [ToMiE: Towards Explicit Exoskeleton for the Reconstruction of Complicated 3D Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08082/) (2024)
- [Sequential Gaussian Avatars with Hierarchical Motion Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16768/) (2024)
- [PICA: Physics-Integrated Clothed Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05324/) (2024)
- [Motion-Aware Animatable Gaussian Avatars Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16758/) (2024)
- [Advances in Radiance Field for Dynamic Scene: From Neural Field to Gaussian Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10049/) (2025)
- [Generalizable Neural Human Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14199/) (2024)
- [R3-Avatar: Record and Retrieve Temporal Codebook for Reconstructing Photorealistic Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12751/) (2025)
- [Deblur-Avatar: Animatable Avatars from Motion-Blurred Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13335/) (2025)
- [DNF-Avatar: Distilling Neural Fields for Real-time Animatable Avatar Relighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10486/) (2025)
- [SVAD: From Single Image to 3D Avatar via Synthetic Data Generation with Video Diffusion and Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05475/) (2025)
- [Snap-Snap: Taking Two Images to Reconstruct 3D Human Gaussians in Milliseconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14892/) (2025)
- [Learning Efficient and Generalizable Human Representation with Human Gaussian Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18758/) (2025)
- [On the Skinning of Gaussian Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11411/) (2025)
- [GSAC: Leveraging Gaussian Splatting for Photorealistic Avatar Creation with Unity Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12999/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose SplatArmor, a novel approach for recovering detailed and animatable human models by `armoring' a parameterized body model with 3D Gaussians. Our approach represents the human as a set of 3D Gaussians within a canonical space, whose articulation is defined by extending the skinning of the underlying SMPL geometry to arbitrary locations in the canonical space. To account for pose-dependent effects, we introduce a SE(3) field, which allows us to capture both the location and anisotropy of the Gaussians. Furthermore, we propose the use of a neural color field to provide color regularization and 3D supervision for the precise positioning of these Gaussians. We show that Gaussian splatting provides an interesting alternative to neural rendering based methods by leverging a rasterization primitive without facing any of the non-differentiability and optimization challenges typically faced in such approaches. The rasterization paradigms allows us to leverage forward skinning, and does not suffer from the ambiguities associated with inverse skinning and warping. We show compelling results on the ZJU MoCap and People Snapshot datasets, which underscore the effectiveness of our method for controllable human synthesis.