DeepProfile: Accurate Under-the-Clothes Body Profile Estimation

Abstract

Accurate human body profiles have many potential applications. Image-based human body profile estimation can be regarded as a fine-grained semantic segmentation problem, which is typically used to locate objects and boundaries in images. However, existing image segmentation methods, such as human parsing, require significant amounts of annotation and their datasets consider clothes as part of the human body profile. Therefore, the results they generate are not accurate when the human subject is dressed in loose-fitting clothing. In this paper, we created and labeled an under-the-clothes human body contour keypoint dataset; we utilized a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract the contour keypoints, then combined them with a body profile database to generate under-the-clothes profiles. In order to improve the precision of keypoint detection, we propose a short-skip multi-scale dense (SMSD) block in the CNN to keep the details of the image and increase the information flow among different layers. Extensive experiments were conducted to show the effectiveness of our method. We demonstrate that our method achieved better results—especially when the person was dressed in loose-fitting clothes—than and competitive quantitative performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, while requiring less annotation effort. We also extended our method to the applications of 3D human model reconstruction and body size measurement.