Generative Modeling of Shape-Dependent Self-Contact Human Poses

Abstract: One can hardly model self-contact of human poses without considering underlying body shapes. For example, the pose of rubbing a belly for a person with a low BMI leads to penetration of the hand into the belly for a person with a high BMI. Despite its relevance, existing self-contact datasets lack the variety of self-contact poses and precise body shapes, limiting conclusive analysis between self-contact poses and shapes. To address this, we begin by introducing the first extensive self-contact dataset with precise body shape registration, Goliath-SC, consisting of 383K self-contact poses across 130 subjects. Using this dataset, we propose generative modeling of self-contact prior conditioned by body shape parameters, based on a body-part-wise latent diffusion with self-attention. We further incorporate this prior into single-view human pose estimation while refining estimated poses to be in contact. Our experiments suggest that shape conditioning is vital to the successful modeling of self-contact pose distribution, hence improving single-view pose estimation in self-contact.