Internship M2: Detailed riggable humans from multi-view video
Level of qualifications required : Graduate degree or equivalent
Other valued qualifications : Master 2
Fonction : Internship Research
About the research centre or Inria department
The Inria Grenoble research center groups together almost 600 people in 27 research teams and 8 research support departments.
Staff is present on three campuses in Grenoble, in close collaboration with other research and higher education institutions (University Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, CEA, INRAE, …), but also with key economic players in the area.
Inria Grenoble is active in the fields of high-performance computing, verification and embedded systems, modeling of the environment at multiple levels, and data science and artificial intelligence. The center is a top-level scientific institute with an extensive network of international collaborations in Europe and the rest of the world.
Context
Within the framework of a partnership (you can choose between)
- BPI transfer project Banque de France 4 years
Assignment
Context
Many works nowadays provide solutions for the avatarization process, i.e. obtaining a 3D, animatable model from one or several images. This is a very hard problem as shape fidelity, animatability, fast computation time and low number of required input cameras are all desirable, but hardly realizable simultaneously. For example, obtaining plausible models form a single camera video is nowadays feasable, but often at the cost of shape quality due to the use of low-parametric models such as SMPL. Using many videos for redundancy can allow to acquire more detail, but at the expense of computation speed. And all this detail needs to be animatable, which gets more complex with the scale of detail (i.e. millimeter shape with only a human kinematic rig), again putting a burden on the model and its computation time.
Mission
In recent years the Morpheo team has come up with very precise multi-view reconstruction approaches [1].
In this master proposal, we wish to examine the problem of animating this type of detailed model and rig it, by exploring the stream of recent methods.
Main activities
During his internship, the master candidate is expected to tackle the following tasks
- establish a more complete bibliography of relevant methods based on the initial suggested references
- propose and discuss likely and realizable methodological and architecture innovations / reparametrizations that allow to rig and estimate a detailed animated model from images, grounded in this existing work
- propose and discuss dataset enhancements that would enrich the training toward better performance for these tasks
- identify existing datasets that are relevant for comparative evaluation of performance of his proposals. In-house datasets such as 4DHumanOutfit[2]
Benefits package
- Subsidized meals
- Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
- Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
- Social, cultural and sports events and activities
Remuneration
- Minimum legal gratification
General Information
- Theme/Domain :
Vision, perception and multimedia interpretation
Scientific computing (BAP E) - Town/city : Montbonnot
- Inria Center : Centre Inria de l'Université Grenoble Alpes
- Starting date : 2026-02-02
- Duration of contract : 7 months
- Deadline to apply : 2026-01-15
Warning : you must enter your e-mail address in order to save your application to Inria. Applications must be submitted online on the Inria website. Processing of applications sent from other channels is not guaranteed.
Instruction to apply
Applications must be submitted online on the Inria website.
Processing of applications sent by other channels is not guaranteed.
Your application file must include a CV, covering letter, academic transcripts and course syllabus for the last two years of the program followed
Please include with your application any published documents to which you have contributed (as a co-author): master's thesis, scientific publication, etc.
Defence Security :
This position is likely to be situated in a restricted area (ZRR), as defined in Decree No. 2011-1425 relating to the protection of national scientific and technical potential (PPST).Authorisation to enter an area is granted by the director of the unit, following a favourable Ministerial decision, as defined in the decree of 3 July 2012 relating to the PPST. An unfavourable Ministerial decision in respect of a position situated in a ZRR would result in the cancellation of the appointment.
Recruitment Policy :
As part of its diversity policy, all Inria positions are accessible to people with disabilities.
Contacts
- Inria Team : MORPHEO
-
Recruiter :
Franco Jean / jean-sebastien.franco@inria.fr
The keys to success
This internship is aimed at M1/M2 candidates, preferably with some skills in the following domains
- computer vision, image processing background
- AI / machine learning / deep learning background
- some Python / PyTorch experience
- scientific curiosity, taste and autonomy in explorative tasks and problems
References
[1] Toussaint, Briac and Thomas, Diego and Franco, Jean-Sébastien
ProbeSDF: Light Field Probes For Neural Surface Reconstruction, Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference, 2025
[2] Armando, Matthieu / Boissieux, Laurence / Boyer, Edmond / Franco, Jean-Sébastien / Humenberger, Martin / Legras, Christophe / Leroy, Vincent / Marsot, Mathieu / Pansiot, Julien / Pujades, Sergi / Rekik, Rim / Rogez, Grégory / Swamy, Anilkumar / Wuhrer, Stefanie
4DHumanOutfit: A multi-subject 4D dataset of human motion sequences in varying outfits exhibiting large displacements
2023 Computer Vision and Image Understanding , Vol. 237
[3] Eisert, P., Hilsmann, A. (2020). Hybrid Human Modeling: Making Volumetric Video Animatable. In: Magnor, M., Sorkine-Hornung, A. (eds) Real VR – Immersive Digital Reality. Lecture Notes in Computer Science
[4] AvatarReX: Real-time Expressive Full-body Avatars
Zerong Zheng, Xiaochen Zhao, Hongwen Zhang, Boning Liu, Yebin Liu. SIGGRAPH 2023
[5] Zhouyingcheng Liao and Vladislav Golyanik and Marc Habermann and Christian Theobalt
VINECS: Video-based Neural Character Skinning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024
[6] Sapiens, Foundation for Human Vision Models
Rawal Khirodkar · Timur Bagautdinov · Julieta Martinez · Su Zhaoen · Austin James
Peter Selednik . Stuart Anderson . Shunsuke Saito
ECCV 2024
[7] Wojciech Zielonka, Timur Bagautdinov, Shunsuke Saito,
Michael Zollhöfer, Justus Thies, Javier Romero
D3GA - Drivable 3D Gaussian Avatars
I3DV 2025
[8] Yushuo Chen, Zerong Zheng, Zhe Li, Chao Xu, Yebin Liu,
MeshAvatar: Learning High-quality Triangular
Human Avatars from Multi-view Videos
ECCV 2024
[9] Decai Chen, Brianne Oberson, Ingo Feldmann,
Oliver Schreer, Anna Hilsmann, Peter Eisert
Adaptive and Temporally Consistent Gaussian Surfels for Multi-view Dynamic Reconstruction
WACV 2025 Oral
About Inria
Inria is the French national research institute dedicated to digital science and technology. It employs 2,600 people. Its 200 agile project teams, generally run jointly with academic partners, include more than 3,500 scientists and engineers working to meet the challenges of digital technology, often at the interface with other disciplines. The Institute also employs numerous talents in over forty different professions. 900 research support staff contribute to the preparation and development of scientific and entrepreneurial projects that have a worldwide impact.