High-Quality Depth Map Generation of Humans in Monocular Videos

The quality of 2D-to-3D conversion depends on the accuracy of the assigned depth to scene objects. Manual depth painting for given objects is labor intensive as each frame is painted. Specifically, a human is one of the most challenging objects for a high-quality conversion, as a human body is an articulated figure and has many degrees of freedom (DOF). In addition, various styles of clothes, accessories, and hair create a very complex silhouette around the 2D human object. We propose an efficient method to estimate visually pleasing depths of a human at every frame in a monocular video. First, a 3D template model is matched to a person in a monocular video with a small number of specified user correspondences. Our pose estimation with sequential joint angular constraints reproduces a various range of human motions (i.e., spine bending) by allowing the utilization of a fully skinned 3D model with a large number of joints and DOFs. The initial depth of the 2D object in the video is assigned from the matched results, and then propagated toward areas where the depth is missing to produce a complete depth map. For the effective handling of the complex silhouettes and appearances, we introduce a partial depth propagation method based on color segmentation to ensure the detail of the results. We compared the result and depth maps painted by experienced artists. The comparison shows that our method produces viable depth maps of humans in monocular videos efficiently.