  We describe the first method to automatically estimate the 3D pose of the
human body as well as its 3D shape from a single unconstrained image. We
estimate a full 3D mesh and show that 2D joints alone carry a surprising amount
of information about body shape. The problem is challenging because of the
complexity of the human body, articulation, occlusion, clothing, lighting, and
the inherent ambiguity in inferring 3D from 2D. To solve this, we first use a
recently published CNN-based method, DeepCut, to predict (bottom-up) the 2D
body joint locations. We then fit (top-down) a recently published statistical
body shape model, called SMPL, to the 2D joints. We do so by minimizing an
objective function that penalizes the error between the projected 3D model
joints and detected 2D joints. Because SMPL captures correlations in human
shape across the population, we are able to robustly fit it to very little
data. We further leverage the 3D model to prevent solutions that cause
interpenetration. We evaluate our method, SMPLify, on the Leeds Sports,
HumanEva, and Human3.6M datasets, showing superior pose accuracy with respect
to the state of the art.
