AR Poser: Automatically Augmenting Mobile Pictures with Digital Avatars Imitating Poses

In this paper, we describe our first contribution to AR Poser: a technique for digital characters to recognize and automatically reproduce the same pose as a person in a picture (using only RGB information from a mobile device).

We introduce AR Poser: a framework for posing with, or as a digital character. In this paper, we describe a technique for digital characters to recognize and automatically reproduce the same pose as a person in a picture (using only RGB information from a mobile device). 3D human pose estimation from RGB is an under-constrained and ambiguous problem that remains today an active field of study. Instead of addressing the general case of human pose estimation, we propose a solution that can be tailored to a specific scenario—such as entertainment poses for AR selfies. At the heart of our solution is a set of predefined poses (selfie poses) utilized to reduce ambiguities. In a nutshell, our method consists of two reliable steps: we first perform 2D pose estimation, and then perform a projection onto the 3D subspace to find the closest matching 3D pose. With our method, we are able to automatically create augmented reality selfies for a variety of different poses.