HumanSplatHMR: Closing the Loop Between Human Mesh Recovery and Gaussian Splatting Avatar

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zong, Yeheng, Kung, Pou-Chun, Pan, Yike, Isaacson, Seth, Chen, Yizhou, Vasudevan, Ram, Skinner, Katherine A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918516065566720
author Zong, Yeheng
Kung, Pou-Chun
Pan, Yike
Isaacson, Seth
Chen, Yizhou
Vasudevan, Ram
Skinner, Katherine A.
author_facet Zong, Yeheng
Kung, Pou-Chun
Pan, Yike
Isaacson, Seth
Chen, Yizhou
Vasudevan, Ram
Skinner, Katherine A.
contents Accurately recovering human pose and appearance from video is an essential component of scene reconstruction, with applications to motion capture, motion prediction, virtual reality, and digital twinning. Despite significant interest in building realistic human avatars from video, this paper demonstrates that existing methods do not accurately recover the 3D geometry of humans. ViT-based approaches are not consistently reliable and can overfit to 2D views, while NeRF- and Gaussian Splatting-based avatars treat pose and appearance separately, limiting rendering generalization to new poses. To resolve these shortcomings, this paper proposes HumanSplatHMR, a joint optimization framework that refines 3D human poses while simultaneously learning a high-fidelity avatar for novel-view and novel-pose synthesis. Our key insight is to close the loop between geometric pose estimation and differentiable rendering. Unlike prior human avatar methods that rely on accurate human pose obtained through motion capture systems or offline refinement, which are impractical in in-the-wild scenarios, our approach uses only human mesh estimates from a state-of-the-art human pose estimator to better reflect real-world conditions. Therefore, instead of using the human pose only as a deformation prior, HumanSplatHMR backpropagates photometric, segmentation, and depth losses through a differentiable renderer to the pose parameters and global position. This coupling refines the global 3D pose over time, improving accuracy and alignment while producing better renderings from novel views. Experiments show consistent improvements over pose recovery baselines that omit image-level refinement and avatar baselines that decouple pose estimation from avatar reconstruction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_02784
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HumanSplatHMR: Closing the Loop Between Human Mesh Recovery and Gaussian Splatting Avatar
Zong, Yeheng
Kung, Pou-Chun
Pan, Yike
Isaacson, Seth
Chen, Yizhou
Vasudevan, Ram
Skinner, Katherine A.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Accurately recovering human pose and appearance from video is an essential component of scene reconstruction, with applications to motion capture, motion prediction, virtual reality, and digital twinning. Despite significant interest in building realistic human avatars from video, this paper demonstrates that existing methods do not accurately recover the 3D geometry of humans. ViT-based approaches are not consistently reliable and can overfit to 2D views, while NeRF- and Gaussian Splatting-based avatars treat pose and appearance separately, limiting rendering generalization to new poses. To resolve these shortcomings, this paper proposes HumanSplatHMR, a joint optimization framework that refines 3D human poses while simultaneously learning a high-fidelity avatar for novel-view and novel-pose synthesis. Our key insight is to close the loop between geometric pose estimation and differentiable rendering. Unlike prior human avatar methods that rely on accurate human pose obtained through motion capture systems or offline refinement, which are impractical in in-the-wild scenarios, our approach uses only human mesh estimates from a state-of-the-art human pose estimator to better reflect real-world conditions. Therefore, instead of using the human pose only as a deformation prior, HumanSplatHMR backpropagates photometric, segmentation, and depth losses through a differentiable renderer to the pose parameters and global position. This coupling refines the global 3D pose over time, improving accuracy and alignment while producing better renderings from novel views. Experiments show consistent improvements over pose recovery baselines that omit image-level refinement and avatar baselines that decouple pose estimation from avatar reconstruction.
title HumanSplatHMR: Closing the Loop Between Human Mesh Recovery and Gaussian Splatting Avatar
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02784