From Mannequin to Human: A Pose-Aware and Identity-Preserving Video Generation Framework for Lifelike Clothing Display

Abstract: Mannequin-based clothing displays offer a cost-effective alternative to real-model showcases for online fashion presentation, but lack realism and expressive detail. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new task called mannequin-to-human (M2H) video generation, which aims to synthesize identity-controllable, photorealistic human videos from footage of mannequins. We propose M2HVideo, a pose-aware and identity-preserving video generation framework that addresses two key challenges: the misalignment between head and body motion, and identity drift caused by temporal modeling. In particular, M2HVideo incorporates a dynamic pose-aware head encoder that fuses facial semantics with body pose to produce consistent identity embeddings across frames. To address the loss of fine facial details due to latent space compression, we introduce a mirror loss applied in pixel space through a denoising diffusion implicit model (DDIM)-based one-step denoising. Additionally, we design a distribution-aware adapter that aligns statistical distributions of identity and clothing features to enhance temporal coherence. Extensive experiments on the UBC fashion dataset, our self-constructed ASOS dataset, and the newly collected MannequinVideos dataset captured on-site demonstrate that M2HVideo achieves superior performance in terms of clothing consistency, identity preservation, and video fidelity in comparison to state-of-the-art methods.