  Deep generative modelling for human body analysis is an emerging problem with
many interesting applications. However, the latent space learned by such
approaches is typically not interpretable, resulting in less flexibility. In
this work, we present deep generative models for human body analysis in which
the body pose and the visual appearance are disentangled. Such a
disentanglement allows independent manipulation of pose and appearance, and
hence enables applications such as pose-transfer without specific training for
such a task. Our proposed models, the Conditional-DGPose and the Semi-DGPose,
have different characteristics. In the first, body pose labels are taken as
conditioners, from a fully-supervised training set. In the second, our
structured semi-supervised approach allows for pose estimation to be performed
by the model itself and relaxes the need for labelled data. Therefore, the
Semi-DGPose aims for the joint understanding and generation of people in
images. It is not only capable of mapping images to interpretable latent
representations but also able to map these representations back to the image
space. We compare our models with relevant baselines, the ClothNet-Body and the
Pose Guided Person Generation networks, demonstrating their merits on the
Human3.6M, ChictopiaPlus and DeepFashion benchmarks.
