PersonNeRF : Personalized Reconstruction from Photo Collections

Chung-Yi Weng, Pratul P. Srinivasan, Brian Curless, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman

Abstract: We present PersonNeRF, a method that takes a collection of photos of a subject (e.g. Roger Federer) captured across multiple years with arbitrary body poses and ap-pearances, and enables rendering the subject with arbitrary novel combinations of viewpoint, body pose, and appearance. PersonNeRF builds a customized neural volumetric 3D model of the subject that is able to render an entire space spanned by camera viewpoint, body pose, and appearance. A central challenge in this task is dealing with sparse observations; a given body pose is likely only observed by a single viewpoint with a single appearance, and a given appearance is only observed under a handful of different body poses. We address this issue by recovering a canonical T-pose neural volumetric representation of the subject that allows for changing appearance across different observations, but uses a shared pose-dependent motion field across all observations. We demonstrate that this approach, along with regularization of the recovered volumetric geometry to encourage smoothness, is able to recover a model that renders compelling images from novel combinations of viewpoint, pose, and appearance from these challenging unstructured photo collections, outperforming prior work for free-viewpoint human rendering.