ThicknessVAE: Learning a Lateral Prior for Clothed Human Body Reconstruction

Sandwich-like structures have shown remarkable efficacy in clothed human reconstruction. However, these approaches often generate unrealistic side geometries due to inadequate handling of lateral regions. This paper addresses this limitation by incorporating the side geometry of clothed humans as a prior. We propose ThicknessVAE, a novel two-stage method that makes two key contributions: (1) We learn a prototype from point clouds for the lateral regions of clothed humans to extract common and detailed geometric features. (2) We utilize this prototype as a prior to transform geometric features into a thickness map associated with clothed human images, enabling refined normal integration for sandwich-like reconstruction methods. By seamlessly integrating our model into the sandwich-like reconstruction pipeline, we achieve highly realistic side views. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our approach is comparable to state-of-the-art methods in terms of side-view realism.