Collecting The Puzzle Pieces: Disentangled Self-Driven Human Pose Transfer by Permuting Textures

Human pose transfer synthesizes new view(s) of a person for a given pose. Recent work achieves this via self-reconstruction, which disentangles a person's pose and texture information by breaking down the person into several parts, then recombines them to reconstruct the person. However, this part-level disentanglement preserves some pose information that can create unwanted artifacts. In this paper, we propose Pose Transfer by Permuting Textures, a self-driven human pose transfer approach that disentangles pose from texture at the patch-level. Specifically, we remove pose from an input image by permuting image patches so only texture information remains. Then we reconstruct the input image by sampling from the permuted textures to achieve patch-level disentanglement. To reduce the noise and recover clothing shape information from the permuted patches, we employ encoders with multiple kernel sizes in a triple branch network. Extensive experiments on DeepFashion and Market-1501 show that our model improves the quality of generated images in terms of FID, LPIPS and SSIM over other self-driven methods, and even outperforming some fully-supervised methods. A user study also shows that among self-driven approaches, images generated by our method are preferred in 68% of cases over prior work. Code is available at https://github.com/NannanLi999/pt_square.