Applications that involve supervised training require paired images. Researchers of single image super-resolution (SISR) create such images by artificially generating blurry input images from the corresponding ground truth. Similarly we can create paired images with the canny edge. We propose Generator From Edges (GFE) [Figure 2]. Our aim is to determine the best architecture for GFE, along with reviews of perceptual loss [1, 2]. To this end, we conducted three experiments. First, we explored the effects of the adversarial loss often used in SISR. In particular, we uncovered that it is not an essential component to form a perceptual loss. Eliminating adversarial loss will lead to a more effective architecture from the perspective of hardware resource. It also means that considerations for the problems pertaining to generative adversarial network (GAN) [3], such as mode collapse, are not necessary. Second, we reexamined VGG loss and found that the mid-layers yield the best results. By extracting the full potential of VGG loss, the overall performance of perceptual loss improves significantly. Third, based on the findings of the first two experiments, we reevaluated the dense network to construct GFE. Using GFE as an intermediate process, reconstructing a facial image from a pencil sketch can become an easy task.
Ankara University（安卡拉大学）；Hacettepe University（哈杰泰佩大学）
Facial image inpainting is a challenging problem as it requires generating new pixels that include semantic information for masked key components in a face, e.g., eyes and nose. Recently, remarkable methods have been proposed in this field. Most of these approaches use encoder-decoder architectures and have different limitations such as allowing unique results for a given image and a particular mask. Alternatively, some optimization-based approaches generate promising results using different masks with generator networks. However, these approaches are computationally more expensive. In this pa…
Automatic synthesis of faces from visual attributes is an important problem in computer vision and has wide applications in law enforcement and entertainment. With the advent of deep generative convolutional neural networks (CNNs), attempts have been made to synthesize face images from attributes and text descriptions. In this paper, we take a different approach, where we formulate the original problem as a stage-wise learning problem. We first synthesize the facial sketch corresponding to the visual attributes and then we generate the face image based on the synthesized sketch. The proposed f…
Facial expression transfer and reenactment has been an important research problem given its applications in face editing, image manipulation, and fabricated videos generation. We present a novel method for image-based facial expression transfer, leveraging the recent style-based GAN shown to be very effective for creating realistic looking images. Given two face images, our method can create plausible results that combine the appearance of one image and the expression of the other. To achieve this, we first propose an optimization procedure based on StyleGAN to infer hierarchical style vector …
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
It has been recently shown that neural networks can recover the geometric structure of a face from a single given image. A common denominator of most existing face geometry reconstruction methods is the restriction of the solution space to some low-dimensional subspace. While such a model significantly simplifies the reconstruction problem, it is inherently limited in its expressiveness. As an alternative, we propose an Image-to-Image translation network that jointly maps the input image to a depth image and a facial correspondence map. This explicit pixel-based mapping can then be utilized to…
OMGTex: One-stage Multi-style Facial Texture Reconstruction without Geometry Guidance
School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）科学与工程学院）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Future Networks of Intelligence（广东省未来网络智能化重点实验室）；FNii-Shenzhen（FNii-深圳）
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung Univ.（国立阳明交通大学）；Hiroshima Univ.（广岛大学）
Neuroscience studies have revealed that the brain encodes visual content and embeds information in neural activity. Recently, deep learning techniques have facilitated attempts to address visual reconstructions by mapping brain activity to image stimuli using generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, none of these studies have considered the semantic meaning of latent code in image space. Omitting semantic information could potentially limit the performance. In this study, we propose a new framework to reconstruct facial images from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. Wit…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
We present a large-scale facial UV-texture dataset that contains over 50,000 high-quality texture UV-maps with even illuminations, neutral expressions, and cleaned facial regions, which are desired characteristics for rendering realistic 3D face models under different lighting conditions. The dataset is derived from a large-scale face image dataset namely FFHQ, with the help of our fully automatic and robust UV-texture production pipeline. Our pipeline utilizes the recent advances in StyleGAN-based facial image editing approaches to generate multi-view normalized face images from single-image …
A Deep Learning Approach for Facial Attribute Manipulation and Reconstruction in Surveillance and Reconnaissance
Department of Networks and Digital Media（网络与数字媒体系）；Kingston University（金史密斯大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；University of Westminster（威斯敏斯特大学）
Many methods have been proposed over the years to tackle the task of facial 3D geometry and texture recovery from a single image. Such methods often fail to provide high-fidelity texture without relying on 3D facial scans during training. In contrast, the complementary task of 3D facial generation has not received as much attention. As opposed to the 2D texture domain, where GANs have proven to produce highly realistic facial images, the more challenging 3D geometry domain has not yet caught up to the same levels of realism and diversity. In this paper, we propose a novel unified pipeline for …
Facial image super-resolution (SR) is an important preprocessing for facial image analysis, face recognition, and image-based 3D face reconstruction. Recent convolutional neural network (CNN) based method has shown excellent performance by learning mapping relation using pairs of low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) facial images. However, since the HR facial image reconstruction using CNN is conventionally aimed to increase the PSNR and SSIM metrics, the reconstructed HR image might not be realistic even with high scores. An adversarial framework is proposed in this study to reconstru…
Encoder-decoder based architecture has been widely used in the generator of generative adversarial networks for facial manipulation. However, we observe that the current architecture fails to recover the input image color, rich facial details such as skin color or texture and introduces artifacts as well. In this paper, we present a novel method named SARGAN that addresses the above-mentioned limitations from three perspectives. First, we employed spatial attention-based residual block instead of vanilla residual blocks to properly capture the expression-related features to be changed while ke…
A lot of work has been done towards reconstructing the 3D facial structure from single images by capitalizing on the power of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs). In the recent works, the texture features either correspond to components of a linear texture space or are learned by auto-encoders directly from in-the-wild images. In all cases, the quality of the facial texture reconstruction is still not capable of modeling facial texture with high-frequency details. In this paper, we take a radically different approach and harness the power of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and DC…
Ecole Centrale de Lyon（里昂中央理工学院）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
Occlusions are very common in face images in the wild, leading to the degraded performance of face-related tasks. Although much effort has been devoted to removing occlusions from face images, the varying shapes and textures of occlusions still challenge the robustness of current methods. As a result, current methods either rely on manual occlusion masks or only apply to specific occlusions. This paper proposes a novel face de-occlusion model based on face segmentation and 3D face reconstruction, which automatically removes all kinds of face occlusions with even blurred boundaries,e.g., hairs.…
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；The University of Colorado at Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）
Current state-of-the-art photorealistic generators are computationally expensive, involve unstable training processes, and have real and synthetic distributions that are dissimilar in higher-dimensional spaces. To solve these issues, we propose a variant of the StackGAN architecture. The new architecture incorporates conditional generators to construct an image in many stages. In our model, we generate grayscale facial images in two different stages: noise to edges (stage one) and edges to grayscale (stage two). Our model is trained with the CelebA facial image dataset and achieved a Fréchet I…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Middlesex（密德萨斯大学）
In the past few years, a lot of work has been done towards reconstructing the 3D facial structure from single images by capitalizing on the power of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs). In the most recent works, differentiable renderers were employed in order to learn the relationship between the facial identity features and the parameters of a 3D morphable model for shape and texture. The texture features either correspond to components of a linear texture space or are learned by auto-encoders directly from in-the-wild images. In all cases, the quality of the facial texture reconstruct…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
Facial aging and facial rejuvenation analyze a given face photograph to predict a future look or estimate a past look of the person. To achieve this, it is critical to preserve human identity and the corresponding aging progression and regression with high accuracy. However, existing methods cannot simultaneously handle these two objectives well. We propose a novel generative adversarial network based approach, named the Conditional Multi-Adversarial AutoEncoder with Ordinal Regression (CMAAE-OR). It utilizes an age estimation technique to control the aging accuracy and takes a high-level feat…
Over the last years, with the advent of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), many face analysis tasks have accomplished astounding performance, with applications including, but not limited to, face generation and 3D face reconstruction from a single "in-the-wild" image. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, there is no method which can produce high-resolution photorealistic 3D faces from "in-the-wild" images and this can be attributed to the: (a) scarcity of available data for training, and (b) lack of robust methodologies that can successfully be applied on very high-resolution data.…
Recent studies on multi-domain facial image translation have achieved impressive results. The existing methods generally provide a discriminator with an auxiliary classifier to impose domain translation. However, these methods neglect important information regarding domain distribution matching. To solve this problem, we propose a switch generative adversarial network (SwitchGAN) with a more adaptive discriminator structure and a matched generator to perform delicate image translation among multiple domains. A feature-switching operation is proposed to achieve feature selection and fusion in o…
DynamicAvatars: Accurate Dynamic Facial Avatars Reconstruction and Precise Editing with Diffusion Models
School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学软件学院）；National Engineering Research Center for Visual Information and Applications, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学视觉信息与应用国家工程研究中心）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学人工智能与机器人研究所）；National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Xi’an Jiaotong University（人机混合增强智能全国重点实验室）
Object removal and image inpainting in facial images is a task in which objects that occlude a facial image are specifically targeted, removed, and replaced by a properly reconstructed facial image. Two different approaches utilizing U-net and modulated generator respectively have been widely endorsed for this task for their unique advantages but notwithstanding each method's innate disadvantages. U-net, a conventional approach for conditional GANs, retains fine details of unmasked regions but the style of the reconstructed image is inconsistent with the rest of the original image and only wor…
University of Science and Technology in China（中国科学技术大学）
Benefiting from the development of generative adversarial networks (GAN), facial manipulation has achieved significant progress in both academia and industry recently. It inspires an increasing number of entertainment applications but also incurs severe threats to individual privacy and even political security meanwhile. To mitigate such risks, many countermeasures have been proposed. However, the great majority methods are designed in a passive manner, which is to detect whether the facial images or videos are tampered after their wide propagation. These detection-based methods have a fatal l…
Korea University（高丽大学）；Army Research Laboratory（陆军研究实验室）
The goal of face attribute editing is altering a facial image according to given target attributes such as hair color, mustache, gender, etc. It belongs to the image-to-image domain transfer problem with a set of attributes considered as a distinctive domain. There have been some works in multi-domain transfer problem focusing on facial attribute editing employing Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). These methods have reported some successes but they also result in unintended changes in facial regions - meaning the generator alters regions unrelated to the specified attributes. To address th…
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This maxim, emphasizing the subjectivity of the perception of beauty, has enjoyed a wide consensus since ancient times. In the digitalera, data-driven methods have been shown to be able to predict human-assigned beauty scores for facial images. In this work, we augment this ability and train a generative model that generates faces conditioned on a requested beauty score. In addition, we show how this trained generator can be used to beautify an input face image. By doing so, we achieve an unsupervised beautification model, in the sense that it relies on no…
Center for Research on Intelligent Perception and Computing, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所智能感知与计算研究中心）；National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Age progression/regression is a challenging task due to the complicated and non-linear transformation in human aging process. Many researches have shown that both global and local facial features are essential for face representation, but previous GAN based methods mainly focused on the global feature in age synthesis. To utilize both global and local facial information, we propose a Global and Local Consistent Age Generative Adversarial Network (GLCA-GAN). In our generator, a global network learns the whole facial structure and simulates the aging trend of the whole face, while three crucial …
Jiangnan University（江南大学）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
To learn disentangled representations of facial images, we present a Dual Encoder-Decoder based Generative Adversarial Network (DED-GAN). In the proposed method, both the generator and discriminator are designed with deep encoder-decoder architectures as their backbones. To be more specific, the encoder-decoder structured generator is used to learn a pose disentangled face representation, and the encoder-decoder structured discriminator is tasked to perform real/fake classification, face reconstruction, determining identity and estimating face pose. We further improve the proposed network arch…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)（希腊研究与技术基金会）
Facial video re-targeting is a challenging problem aiming to modify the facial attributes of a target subject in a seamless manner by a driving monocular sequence. We leverage the 3D geometry of faces and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to design a novel deep learning architecture for the task of facial and head reenactment. Our method is different to purely 3D model-based approaches, or recent image-based methods that use Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) to generate individual frames. We manage to capture the complex non-rigid facial motion from the driving monocular performa…
In face-related applications with a public available dataset, synthesizing non-linear facial variations (e.g., facial expression, head-pose, illumination, etc.) through a generative model is helpful in addressing the lack of training data. In reality, however, there is insufficient data to even train the generative model for face synthesis. In this paper, we propose Differential Generative Adversarial Networks (D-GAN) that can perform photo-realistic face synthesis even when training data is small. Two discriminators are devised to ensure the generator to approximate a face manifold, which can…
Facial composites are graphical representations of an eyewitness's memory of a face. Many digital systems are available for the creation of such composites but are either unable to reproduce features unless previously designed or do not allow holistic changes to the image. In this paper, we improve the efficiency of composite creation by removing the reliance on expert knowledge and letting the system learn to represent faces from examples. The novel approach, Composite Generating GAN (CG-GAN), applies generative and evolutionary computation to allow casual users to easily create facial compos…
We propose a method to disentangle linear-encoded facial semantics from StyleGAN without external supervision. The method derives from linear regression and sparse representation learning concepts to make the disentangled latent representations easily interpreted as well. We start by coupling StyleGAN with a stabilized 3D deformable facial reconstruction method to decompose single-view GAN generations into multiple semantics. Latent representations are then extracted to capture interpretable facial semantics. In this work, we make it possible to get rid of labels for disentangling meaningful f…
FaceCom: Towards High-fidelity 3D Facial Shape Completion via Optimization and Inpainting Guidance
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Southwest University（西南大学）；Peking University School and Hospital of Stomatology（北京大学口腔医学院）；State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems（虚拟现实技术与系统国家重点实验室）
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
One-shot video-driven talking face generation aims at producing a synthetic talking video by transferring the facial motion from a video to an arbitrary portrait image. Head pose and facial expression are always entangled in facial motion and transferred simultaneously. However, the entanglement sets up a barrier for these methods to be used in video portrait editing directly, where it may require to modify the expression only while maintaining the pose unchanged. One challenge of decoupling pose and expression is the lack of paired data, such as the same pose but different expressions. Only a…
Peking University（北京大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
Recent research has witnessed the advances in facial image editing tasks. For video editing, however, previous methods either simply apply transformations frame by frame or utilize multiple frames in a concatenated or iterative fashion, which leads to noticeable visual flickers. In addition, these methods are confined to dealing with one specific task at a time without any extensibility. In this paper, we propose a task-agnostic temporally consistent facial video editing framework. Based on a 3D reconstruction model, our framework is designed to handle several editing tasks in a more unified a…
We present an invert-and-edit framework to automatically transform facial weight of an input face image to look thinner or heavier by leveraging semantic facial attributes encoded in the latent space of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Using a pre-trained StyleGAN as the underlying generator, we first employ an optimization-based embedding method to invert the input image into the StyleGAN latent space. Then, we identify the facial-weight attribute direction in the latent space via supervised learning and edit the inverted latent code by moving it positively or negatively along the extr…
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国立阳明交通大学）
Faces manifest large variations in many aspects, such as identity, expression, pose, and face styling. Therefore, it is a great challenge to disentangle and extract these characteristics from facial images, especially in an unsupervised manner. In this work, we introduce cycle-consistency in facial characteristics as free supervisory signal to learn facial representations from unlabeled facial images. The learning is realized by superimposing the facial motion cycle-consistency and identity cycle-consistency constraints. The main idea of the facial motion cycle-consistency is that, given a fac…
North China Electric Power University（华北电力大学）；Liaoning Shihua University（辽宁石油化工大学）；New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院）；Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学）
Facial attribute editing has mainly two objectives: 1) translating image from a source domain to a target one, and 2) only changing the facial regions related to a target attribute and preserving the attribute-excluding details. In this work, we propose a Multi-attention U-Net-based Generative Adversarial Network (MU-GAN). First, we replace a classic convolutional encoder-decoder with a symmetric U-Net-like structure in a generator, and then apply an additive attention mechanism to build attention-based U-Net connections for adaptively transferring encoder representations to complement a decod…
School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering（信息技术与电气工程学院）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）
This paper presents a simple method for speech videos generation based on audio: given a piece of audio, we can generate a video of the target face speaking this audio. We propose Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) with cut speech audio input as condition and use Convolutional Gate Recurrent Unit (GRU) in generator and discriminator. Our model is trained by exploiting the short audio and the frames in this duration. For training, we cut the audio and extract the face in the corresponding frames. We designed a simple encoder and compare the generated frames using GAN with and without GRU. We…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；MPI for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen（图宾根智能系统研究所）
We present a conditional estimation (CEST) framework to learn 3D facial parameters from 2D single-view images by self-supervised training from videos. CEST is based on the process of analysis by synthesis, where the 3D facial parameters (shape, reflectance, viewpoint, and illumination) are estimated from the face image, and then recombined to reconstruct the 2D face image. In order to learn semantically meaningful 3D facial parameters without explicit access to their labels, CEST couples the estimation of different 3D facial parameters by taking their statistical dependency into account. Speci…
Facial landmarks refer to the localization of fundamental facial points on face images. There have been a tremendous amount of attempts to detect these points from facial images however, there has never been an attempt to synthesize a random face and generate its corresponding facial landmarks. This paper presents a framework for augmenting a dataset in a latent Z-space and applied to the regression problem of generating a corresponding set of landmarks from a 2D facial dataset. The BEGAN framework has been used to train a face generator from CelebA database. The inverse of the generator is im…
Advances in deep neural networks have considerably improved the art of animating a still image without operating in 3D domain. Whereas, prior arts can only animate small images (typically no larger than 512x512) due to memory limitations, difficulty of training and lack of high-resolution (HD) training datasets, which significantly reduce their potential for applications in movie production and interactive systems. Motivated by the idea that HD images can be generated by adding high-frequency residuals to low-resolution results produced by a neural network, we propose a novel framework known a…
In this paper, we explore how synthetically generated 3D face models can be used to construct a high accuracy ground truth for depth. This allows us to train the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to solve facial depth estimation problems. These models provide sophisticated controls over image variations including pose, illumination, facial expressions and camera position. 2D training samples can be rendered from these models, typically in RGB format, together with depth information. Using synthetic facial animations, a dynamic facial expression or facial action data can be rendered for a seq…
