KAMA: 3D Keypoint Aware Body Mesh Articulation

Umar Iqbal, Kevin Xie, Yunrong Guo, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov

Abstract: We present KAMA, a 3D Keypoint Aware Mesh Articulation approach that allows us to estimate a human body mesh from the positions of 3D body keypoints. To this end, we learn to estimate 3D positions of 26 body keypoints and propose an analytical solution to articulate a parametric body model, SMPL, via a set of straightforward geometric transformations. Since keypoint estimation directly relies on image clues, our approach offers significantly better alignment to image content when compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Our proposed approach does not require any paired mesh annotations and provides accurate mesh fittings through 3D keypoint regression only. Results on the challenging 3DPW and Human3.6M show that our approach yields state-of-the-art body mesh fittings.