Papers › Learning the Depths of Moving People by Watching Frozen People

Learning the Depths of Moving People by Watching Frozen People

25 Apr 2019CVPR 2019 6arXiv:1904.11111archive 2025-07-28

Zhengqi Li, Tali Dekel, Forrester Cole, Richard Tucker, Noah Snavely, Ce Liu, William T. Freeman

We present a method for predicting dense depth in scenarios where both a monocular camera and people in the scene are freely moving. Existing methods for recovering depth for dynamic, non-rigid objects from monocular video impose strong assumptions on the objects' motion and may only recover sparse depth. In this paper, we take a data-driven approach and learn human depth priors from a new source of data: thousands of Internet videos of people imitating mannequins, i.e., freezing in diverse, natural poses, while a hand-held camera tours the scene. Because people are stationary, training data can be generated using multi-view stereo reconstruction. At inference time, our method uses motion parallax cues from the static areas of the scenes to guide the depth prediction. We demonstrate our method on real-world sequences of complex human actions captured by a moving hand-held camera, show improvement over state-of-the-art monocular depth prediction methods, and show various 3D effects produced using our predicted depth.

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Depth EstimationDepth Prediction

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