# iHuman: Instant Animatable Digital Humans From Monocular Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11174 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11174/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 71 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [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)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [SuGaR: Surface-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for Efficient 3D Mesh Reconstruction and High-Quality Mesh Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12775/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [ICON: Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09127/) (2021)
- [I2L-MeshNet: Image-to-Lixel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Human Pose and Mesh Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03713/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Mesh Regression for Single-Image Human Shape Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03244/) (2019)
- [Mesh Graphormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00272/) (2021)
- [GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02069/) (2023)
- [ARCH: Animatable Reconstruction of Clothed Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04572/) (2020)
- [Multi-Garment Net: Learning to Dress 3D People from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06903/) (2019)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [DRAWER: Digital Reconstruction and Articulation With Environment Realism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15278/) (2025)
- [Real-time High-fidelity Gaussian Human Avatars with Position-based Interpolation of Spatially Distributed MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12909/) (2025)
- [LIFe-GoM: Generalizable Human Rendering with Learned Iterative Feedback Over Multi-Resolution Gaussians-on-Mesh](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09617/) (2025)
- [WonderHuman: Hallucinating Unseen Parts in Dynamic 3D Human Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01045/) (2025)
- [SAT: Supervisor Regularization and Animation Augmentation for Two-process Monocular Texture 3D Human Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19688/) (2025)
- [R3-Avatar: Record and Retrieve Temporal Codebook for Reconstructing Photorealistic Human Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12751/) (2025)
- [Parametric Gaussian Human Model: Generalizable Prior for Efficient and Realistic Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06645/) (2025)
- [Relightable and Dynamic Gaussian Avatar Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09335/) (2025)
- [Gaussian Wardrobe: Compositional 3D Gaussian Avatars for Free-Form Virtual Try-On](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04290/) (2026)
- [HumanGenesis: Agent-Based Geometric and Generative Modeling for Synthetic Human Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09858/) (2025)
- [On the Skinning of Gaussian Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11411/) (2025)
- [Inferring Compositional 4D Scenes without Ever Seeing One](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05272/) (2025)
- [Neural 4D Evolution under Large Topological Changes from 2D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15018/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Avatar-Scene Rendering from Human-centric Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10539/) (2025)
- [NoPo-Avatar: Generalizable and Animatable Avatars from Sparse Inputs without Human Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16673/) (2025)
- [Spatio-Temporal Garment Reconstruction Using Diffusion Mapping via Pattern Coordinates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.24043/) (2026)
- [HumanSplatHMR: Closing the Loop Between Human Mesh Recovery and Gaussian Splatting Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02784/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Personalized 3D avatars require an animatable representation of digital humans. Doing so instantly from monocular videos offers scalability to broad class of users and wide-scale applications. In this paper, we present a fast, simple, yet effective method for creating animatable 3D digital humans from monocular videos. Our method utilizes the efficiency of Gaussian splatting to model both 3D geometry and appearance. However, we observed that naively optimizing Gaussian splats results in inaccurate geometry, thereby leading to poor animations. This work achieves and illustrates the need of accurate 3D mesh-type modelling of the human body for animatable digitization through Gaussian splats. This is achieved by developing a novel pipeline that benefits from three key aspects: (a) implicit modelling of surface's displacements and the color's spherical harmonics; (b) binding of 3D Gaussians to the respective triangular faces of the body template; (c) a novel technique to render normals followed by their auxiliary supervision. Our exhaustive experiments on three different benchmark datasets demonstrates the state-of-the-art results of our method, in limited time settings. In fact, our method is faster by an order of magnitude (in terms of training time) than its closest competitor. At the same time, we achieve superior rendering and 3D reconstruction performance under the change of poses.