# PGAHum: Prior-Guided Geometry and Appearance Learning for High-Fidelity Animatable Human Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.13862 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13862/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [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)
- [ARCH: Animatable Reconstruction of Clothed Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04572/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Learning to Estimate 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Color Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04092/) (2018)
- [STAR: Sparse Trained Articulated Human Body Regressor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08535/) (2020)
- [Neural Body Fitting: Unifying Deep Learning and Model-Based Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05942/) (2018)
- [ARCH++: Animation-Ready Clothed Human Reconstruction Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07845/) (2021)
- [DeepCap: Monocular Human Performance Capture Using Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08325/) (2020)
- [H-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Rendering and Temporal Reconstruction of Humans in Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13746/) (2021)
- [SelfRecon: Self Reconstruction Your Digital Avatar from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12792/) (2022)
- [InstantAvatar: Learning Avatars from Monocular Video in 60 Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10550/) (2022)
- [BCNet: Learning Body and Cloth Shape from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00214/) (2020)
- [Detailed Human Avatars from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01338/) (2018)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13629/) (2021)
- [SCALE: Modeling Clothed Humans with a Surface Codec of Articulated Local Elements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07660/) (2021)
- [Learning Neural Volumetric Representations of Dynamic Humans in Minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12237/) (2023)
- [MonoPerfCap: Human Performance Capture from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02136/) (2017)
- [PoseVocab: Learning Joint-structured Pose Embeddings for Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13006/) (2023)
- [StereoPIFu: Depth Aware Clothed Human Digitization via Stereo Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05289/) (2021)
- [PET-NeuS: Positional Encoding Tri-Planes for Neural Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05594/) (2023)

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

- [Few-shot NeRF by Adaptive Rendering Loss Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17839/) (2024)
- [Human Geometry Distribution for 3D Animation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07459/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent techniques on implicit geometry representation learning and neural rendering have shown promising results for 3D clothed human reconstruction from sparse video inputs. However, it is still challenging to reconstruct detailed surface geometry and even more difficult to synthesize photorealistic novel views with animated human poses. In this work, we introduce PGAHum, a prior-guided geometry and appearance learning framework for high-fidelity animatable human reconstruction. We thoroughly exploit 3D human priors in three key modules of PGAHum to achieve high-quality geometry reconstruction with intricate details and photorealistic view synthesis on unseen poses. First, a prior-based implicit geometry representation of 3D human, which contains a delta SDF predicted by a tri-plane network and a base SDF derived from the prior SMPL model, is proposed to model the surface details and the body shape in a disentangled manner. Second, we introduce a novel prior-guided sampling strategy that fully leverages the prior information of the human pose and body to sample the query points within or near the body surface. By avoiding unnecessary learning in the empty 3D space, the neural rendering can recover more appearance details. Last, we propose a novel iterative backward deformation strategy to progressively find the correspondence for the query point in observation space. A skinning weights prediction model is learned based on the prior provided by the SMPL model to achieve the iterative backward LBS deformation. Extensive quantitative and qualitative comparisons on various datasets are conducted and the results demonstrate the superiority of our framework. Ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of each scheme for geometry and appearance learning.