Animatable Neural Radiance Fields from Monocular RGB-D

This paper aims at representing animatable photo-realistic humans under novel views and poses. Recent work has shown significant progress with dynamic scenes by exploring shared canonical neural radiance fields. However learning a user-controlled model for novel poses remains a challenging task. To tackle this problem, we introduce a novel method to integrate observations across frames and encode the appearance at each individual frame by utilizing the human pose that models the body shape and point clouds which cover partial part of the human as the input. Specifically, our method simultaneously learns a shared set of latent codes anchored to the human pose among frames, and learns an appearance-dependent code anchored to incomplete point clouds generated by monocular RGB-D at each frame. A human pose-based code models the shape of the performer whereas a point cloud based code predicts details and reasons about missing structures at the unseen poses. To further recover non-visible regions in query frames, we utilize a temporal transformer to integrate features of points in query frames and tracked body points from automatically-selected key frames. Experiments on various sequences of humans in motion show that our method significantly outperforms existing works under unseen poses and novel views given monocular RGB-D videos as input.