  Estimating 3D mesh of the human body from a single 2D image is an important
task with many applications such as augmented reality and Human-Robot
interaction. However, prior works reconstructed 3D mesh from global image
feature extracted by using convolutional neural network (CNN), where the dense
correspondences between the mesh surface and the image pixels are missing,
leading to suboptimal solution. This paper proposes a model-free 3D human mesh
estimation framework, named DecoMR, which explicitly establishes the dense
correspondence between the mesh and the local image features in the UV space
(i.e. a 2D space used for texture mapping of 3D mesh). DecoMR first predicts
pixel-to-surface dense correspondence map (i.e., IUV image), with which we
transfer local features from the image space to the UV space. Then the
transferred local image features are processed in the UV space to regress a
location map, which is well aligned with transferred features. Finally we
reconstruct 3D human mesh from the regressed location map with a predefined
mapping function. We also observe that the existing discontinuous UV map are
unfriendly to the learning of network. Therefore, we propose a novel UV map
that maintains most of the neighboring relations on the original mesh surface.
Experiments demonstrate that our proposed local feature alignment and
continuous UV map outperforms existing 3D mesh based methods on multiple public
benchmarks. Code will be made available at
https://github.com/zengwang430521/DecoMR
