Effect of Gender, Pose and Camera Distance on Human Body Dimensions Estimation

Human Body Dimensions Estimation (HBDE) is a task that an intelligent agent can perform to attempt to determine human body information from images (2D) or point clouds or meshes (3D). More specifically, if we define the HBDE problem as inferring human body measurements from images, then HBDE is a difficult, inverse, multi-task regression problem that can be tackled with machine learning techniques, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNN). Despite the community's tremendous effort to advance human shape analysis, there is a lack of systematic experiments to assess CNNs estimation of human body dimensions from images. Our contribution lies in assessing a CNN estimation performance in a series of controlled experiments. To that end, we augment our recently published neural anthropometer dataset by rendering images with different camera distance. We evaluate the network inference absolute and relative mean error between the estimated and actual HBDs. We train and evaluate the CNN in four scenarios: (1) training with subjects of a specific gender, (2) in a specific pose, (3) sparse camera distance and (4) dense camera distance. Not only our experiments demonstrate that the network can perform the task successfully, but also reveal a number of relevant facts that contribute to better understand the task of HBDE.

A Neural Anthropometer Learning from Body Dimensions Computed on Human 3D Meshes

Human shape estimation has become increasingly important both theoretically and practically, for instance, in 3D mesh estimation, distance garment production and computational forensics, to mention just a few examples. As a further specialization, \emph{Human Body Dimensions Estimation} (HBDE) focuses on estimating human body measurements like shoulder width or chest circumference from images or 3D meshes usually using supervised learning approaches. The main obstacle in this context is the data scarcity problem, as collecting this ground truth requires expensive and difficult procedures. This obstacle can be overcome by obtaining realistic human measurements from 3D human meshes. However, a) there are no well established methods to calculate HBDs from 3D meshes and b) there are no benchmarks to fairly compare results on the HBDE task. Our contribution is twofold. On the one hand, we present a method to calculate right and left arm length, shoulder width, and inseam (crotch height) from 3D meshes with focus on potential medical, virtual try-on and distance tailoring applications. On the other hand, we use four additional body dimensions calculated using recently published methods to assemble a set of eight body dimensions which we use as a supervision signal to our Neural Anthropometer: a convolutional neural network capable of estimating these dimensions. To assess the estimation, we train the Neural Anthropometer with synthetic images of 3D meshes, from which we calculated the HBDs and observed that the network's overall mean estimate error is $20.89$ mm (relative error of 2.84\%). The results we present are fully reproducible and establish a fair baseline for research on the task of HBDE, therefore enabling the community with a valuable method.