INDUX-R at the IEEE ICIR 2026 (part 2)

CERTH presented their work entitled “CHARACTER: Clothed Human Animatable Reconstructions viA Cross-view TExture transfeR” at the IEEE ICIR 2026 conference.

CHARACTER is a new system developed under the EU-funded INDUX-R project that turns standard videos or photos into ready-to-animate 3D human avatars in less than three hours.

By exploiting recent advances in 3D reconstruction, CHARACTER goes beyond conventional reconstruction pipelines, automatically converting raw video footage into lightweight, customizable, engine-ready 3D models suitable for interactive applications.

The system achieves this in three seamless steps without needing massive datasets. It first isolates the person from the reconstructed scene using a training-free geometric segmentation approach that exploits estimated camera poses and removes the dominant ground plane, enabling robust extraction even in complex environments.

Next, it adapts a standard SMPL-X template to accurately match the person’s body shape, clothing, and hair by morphing and locally refining the mesh, while preserving the geometry of the hands and fingers to ensure high-quality skeletal rigging and natural animation.

Finally, the customized mesh is shrinkwrapped onto the reconstructed geometry, and detailed, semantically consistent UV texture maps are automatically baked, with intelligent inpainting correcting minor texture inconsistencies to produce a clean, engine-ready avatar.