NeCH: Neural Clothed Human Model

Existing human models, e.g., SMPL and STAR, represent 3D geometry of a human body in the form of a polygon mesh obtained by deforming a template mesh according to a set of shape and pose parameters. The appearance, however, is not directly modeled by most existing human models. We present a novel 3D human model that faithfully models both the 3D geometry and the appearance of a clothed human body with a continuous volumetric representation, i.e., volume densities and emitted colors of continuous 3D locations in the volume encompassing the human body. In contrast to the mesh-based representation whose resolution is limited by a mesh's fixed number of polygons, our volumetric representation does not limit the resolution of our model. Moreover, our volumetric represen-tation can be rendered via differentiable volume rendering, thus enabling us to train the model only using 2D images (without using ground truth 3D geometries of human bodies) by minimizing a loss function which measures the differences between rendered images and ground truth images. On the contrary, existing human models are trained using ground truth 3D geometries of human bodies. Thanks to the ability of our model to jointly model both the geometries and the appearances of clothed people, our model can benefit applications including human image synthesis, gaming and 3D television and telepresence.