A Neural Network for Detailed Human Depth Estimation from a Single Image

This paper presents a neural network to estimate a detailed depth map of the foreground human in a single RGB image. The result captures geometry details such as cloth wrinkles, which are important in visualization applications. To achieve this goal, we separate the depth map into a smooth base shape and a residual detail shape and design a network with two branches to regress them respectively. We design a training strategy to ensure both base and detail shapes can be faithfully learned by the corresponding network branches. Furthermore, we introduce a novel network layer to fuse a rough depth map and surface normals to further improve the final result. Quantitative comparison with fused `ground truth' captured by real depth cameras and qualitative examples on unconstrained Internet images demonstrate the strength of the proposed method.