Everybody Is Unique: Towards Unbiased Human Mesh Recovery

Abstract: We consider the problem of obese human mesh recovery, i.e., fitting a parametric human mesh to images of obese people. Despite obese person mesh fitting being an important problem with numerous applications (e.g., healthcare), much recent progress in mesh recovery has been restricted to images of non-obese people. In this work, we identify this crucial gap in the current literature by presenting and discussing limitations of existing algorithms. Next, we present a simple baseline to address this problem that is scalable and can be easily used in conjunction with existing algorithms to improve their performance. Finally, we present a generalized human mesh optimization algorithm that substantially improves the performance of existing methods on both obese person images as well as community-standard benchmark datasets. A key innovation of this technique is that it does not rely on supervision from expensive-to-create mesh parameters. Instead, starting from widely and cheaply available 2D keypoints annotations, our method automatically generates mesh parameters that can in turn be used to re-train and fine-tune any existing mesh estimation algorithm. This way, we show our method acts as a drop-in to improve the performance of a wide variety of contemporary mesh estimation methods. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets comprising both standard and obese person images and demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed techniques.