We propose a neural head reenactment system, which is driven by a latent pose representation and is capable of predicting the foreground segmentation alongside the RGB image. The latent pose representation is learned as a part of the entire reenactment system, and the learning process is based solely on image reconstruction losses. We show that despite its simplicity, with a large and diverse enough training dataset, such learning successfully decomposes pose from identity. The resulting system can then reproduce mimics of the driving person and, furthermore, can perform cross-person reenactment. Additionally, we show that the learned descriptors are useful for other pose-related tasks, such as keypoint prediction and pose-based retrieval.
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）
Over the past years, a substantial amount of work has been done on the problem of facial reenactment, with the solutions coming mainly from the graphics community. Head reenactment is an even more challenging task, which aims at transferring not only the facial expression, but also the entire head pose from a source person to a target. Current approaches either train person-specific systems, or use facial landmarks to model human heads, a representation that might transfer unwanted identity attributes from the source to the target. We propose head2headFS, a novel easily adaptable pipeline for …
We present a novel Animation CelebHeads dataset (AnimeCeleb) to address an animation head reenactment. Different from previous animation head datasets, we utilize 3D animation models as the controllable image samplers, which can provide a large amount of head images with their corresponding detailed pose annotations. To facilitate a data creation process, we build a semi-automatic pipeline leveraging an open 3D computer graphics software with a developed annotation system. After training with the AnimeCeleb, recent head reenactment models produce high-quality animation head reenactment results…
SelfieAvatar: Real-time Head Avatar reenactment from a Selfie Video
Department of Control Science and Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology（上海理工大学控制科学与工程系）；School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学心理学与神经科学学院）
In recent advances of deep generative models, face reenactment -manipulating and controlling human face, including their head movement-has drawn much attention for its wide range of applicability. Despite its strong expressiveness, it is inevitable that the models fail to reconstruct or accurately generate unseen side of the face of a given single reference image. Most of existing methods alleviate this problem by learning appearances of human faces from large amount of data and generate realistic texture at inference time. Rather than completely relying on what generative models learn, we sho…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；University of Erlangen-Nuremberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）
We propose HeadOn, the first real-time source-to-target reenactment approach for complete human portrait videos that enables transfer of torso and head motion, face expression, and eye gaze. Given a short RGB-D video of the target actor, we automatically construct a personalized geometry proxy that embeds a parametric head, eye, and kinematic torso model. A novel real-time reenactment algorithm employs this proxy to photo-realistically map the captured motion from the source actor to the target actor. On top of the coarse geometric proxy, we propose a video-based rendering technique that compo…
University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)（希腊基础研究与技术基金会（FORTH））
Video-to-video synthesis is a challenging problem aiming at learning a translation function between a sequence of semantic maps and a photo-realistic video depicting the characteristics of a driving video. We propose a head-to-head system of our own implementation capable of fully transferring the human head 3D pose, facial expressions and eye gaze from a source to a target actor, while preserving the identity of the target actor. Our system produces high-fidelity, temporally-smooth and photo-realistic synthetic videos faithfully transferring the human time-varying head attributes from the sou…
FSRT: Facial Scene Representation Transformer for Face Reenactment from Factorized Appearance, Head-pose, and Facial Expression Features
Autonomous Intelligent Systems - Computer Science Institute VI and Center for Robotics, University of Bonn（波恩大学自主智能系统 - 计算机科学第六研究所与机器人中心）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉马尔机器学习和人工智能研究所）
FuriosaAI；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Neosapience；Ajou University（亚洲大学）
The goal of face reenactment is to transfer a target expression and head pose to a source face while preserving the source identity. With the popularity of face-related applications, there has been much research on this topic. However, the results of existing methods are still limited to low-resolution and lack photorealism. In this work, we present a one-shot and high-resolution face reenactment method called MegaFR. To be precise, we leverage StyleGAN by using 3DMM-based rendering images and overcome the lack of high-quality video datasets by designing a loss function that works without high…
Audio-guided face reenactment aims at generating photorealistic faces using audio information while maintaining the same facial movement as when speaking to a real person. However, existing methods can not generate vivid face images or only reenact low-resolution faces, which limits the application value. To solve those problems, we propose a novel deep neural network named APB2Face, which consists of GeometryPredictor and FaceReenactor modules. GeometryPredictor uses extra head pose and blink state signals as well as audio to predict the latent landmark geometry information, while FaceReenact…
Animating a static face image with target facial expressions and movements is important in the area of image editing and movie production. This face reenactment process is challenging due to the complex geometry and movement of human faces. Previous work usually requires a large set of images from the same person to model the appearance. In this paper, we present a one-shot face reenactment model, FaR-GAN, that takes only one face image of any given source identity and a target expression as input, and then produces a face image of the same source identity but with the target expression. The p…
Kingston University（金斯顿大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）
This paper is on face/head reenactment where the goal is to transfer the facial pose (3D head orientation and expression) of a target face to a source face. Previous methods focus on learning embedding networks for identity and pose disentanglement which proves to be a rather hard task, degrading the quality of the generated images. We take a different approach, bypassing the training of such networks, by using (fine-tuned) pre-trained GANs which have been shown capable of producing high-quality facial images. Because GANs are characterized by weak controllability, the core of our approach is …
Kingston University London（伦敦金斯顿大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）
In this paper we address the problem of neural face reenactment, where, given a pair of a source and a target facial image, we need to transfer the target's pose (defined as the head pose and its facial expressions) to the source image, by preserving at the same time the source's identity characteristics (e.g., facial shape, hair style, etc), even in the challenging case where the source and the target faces belong to different identities. In doing so, we address some of the limitations of the state-of-the-art works, namely, a) that they depend on paired training data (i.e., source and target …
Technical University Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Erlangen-Nuremberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）；Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
We propose FaceVR, a novel image-based method that enables video teleconferencing in VR based on self-reenactment. State-of-the-art face tracking methods in the VR context are focused on the animation of rigged 3d avatars. While they achieve good tracking performance the results look cartoonish and not real. In contrast to these model-based approaches, FaceVR enables VR teleconferencing using an image-based technique that results in nearly photo-realistic outputs. The key component of FaceVR is a robust algorithm to perform real-time facial motion capture of an actor who is wearing a head-moun…
MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Philipps-Universität Marburg（马尔堡菲利普大学）；Technicolor（特艺集团）
We propose an image-based, facial reenactment system that replaces the face of an actor in an existing target video with the face of a user from a source video, while preserving the original target performance. Our system is fully automatic and does not require a database of source expressions. Instead, it is able to produce convincing reenactment results from a short source video captured with an off-the-shelf camera, such as a webcam, where the user performs arbitrary facial gestures. Our reenactment pipeline is conceived as part image retrieval and part face transfer: The image retrieval is…
Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）；Aalto University of Technology（阿尔托理工大学）
This paper presents a generic face animator that is able to control the pose and expressions of a given face image. The animation is driven by human interpretable control signals consisting of head pose angles and the Action Unit (AU) values. The control information can be obtained from multiple sources including external driving videos and manual controls. Due to the interpretable nature of the driving signal, one can easily mix the information between multiple sources (e.g. pose from one image and expression from another) and apply selective post-production editing. The proposed face animato…
Navigating Large-Pose Challenge for High-Fidelity Face Reenactment with Video Diffusion Model
National Key Laboratory of Fundamental Science on Synthetic Vision, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China（合成视觉基础科学国家重点实验室，四川大学，成都，610065，中国）；School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China（网络科学与工程学院，四川大学，成都，610065，中国）；College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China（计算机科学学院，四川大学，成都，610065，中国）
University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)（希腊研究与技术基金会）
In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning architecture for facial reenactment. In particular, contrary to the model-based approaches or recent frame-based methods that use Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) to generate individual frames, we propose a novel method that (a) exploits the special structure of facial motion (paying particular attention to mouth motion) and (b) enforces temporal consistency. We demonstrate that the proposed method can transfer facial expressions, pose and gaze of a source actor to a target video in a photo-realistic fashion more accurately than stat…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Saarland Informatics Campus（萨尔兰信息学园区）
We present Neural Voice Puppetry, a novel approach for audio-driven facial video synthesis. Given an audio sequence of a source person or digital assistant, we generate a photo-realistic output video of a target person that is in sync with the audio of the source input. This audio-driven facial reenactment is driven by a deep neural network that employs a latent 3D face model space. Through the underlying 3D representation, the model inherently learns temporal stability while we leverage neural rendering to generate photo-realistic output frames. Our approach generalizes across different peopl…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司）；University of Sussex（萨塞克斯大学）
Recent attempts to solve the problem of head reenactment using a single reference image have shown promising results. However, most of them either perform poorly in terms of photo-realism, or fail to meet the identity preservation problem, or do not fully transfer the driving pose and expression. We propose HeadGAN, a novel system that conditions synthesis on 3D face representations, which can be extracted from any driving video and adapted to the facial geometry of any reference image, disentangling identity from expression. We further improve mouth movements, by utilising audio features as a…
Samsung AI Center – Moscow（三星人工智能中心（莫斯科））；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）；Yandex Armenia（亚美尼亚扬德克斯公司）
We present a system for realistic one-shot mesh-based human head avatars creation, ROME for short. Using a single photograph, our model estimates a person-specific head mesh and the associated neural texture, which encodes both local photometric and geometric details. The resulting avatars are rigged and can be rendered using a neural network, which is trained alongside the mesh and texture estimators on a dataset of in-the-wild videos. In the experiments, we observe that our system performs competitively both in terms of head geometry recovery and the quality of renders, especially for the cr…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司）
We present Dynamic Neural Portraits, a novel approach to the problem of full-head reenactment. Our method generates photo-realistic video portraits by explicitly controlling head pose, facial expressions and eye gaze. Our proposed architecture is different from existing methods that rely on GAN-based image-to-image translation networks for transforming renderings of 3D faces into photo-realistic images. Instead, we build our system upon a 2D coordinate-based MLP with controllable dynamics. Our intuition to adopt a 2D-based representation, as opposed to recent 3D NeRF-like systems, stems from t…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司）；University of Sussex（萨塞克斯大学）
We present Free-HeadGAN, a person-generic neural talking head synthesis system. We show that modeling faces with sparse 3D facial landmarks are sufficient for achieving state-of-the-art generative performance, without relying on strong statistical priors of the face, such as 3D Morphable Models. Apart from 3D pose and facial expressions, our method is capable of fully transferring the eye gaze, from a driving actor to a source identity. Our complete pipeline consists of three components: a canonical 3D key-point estimator that regresses 3D pose and expression-related deformations, a gaze estim…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；AI Research of JD.com（京东人工智能研究院）
Person re-identification (Re-ID) aims at retrieving an input person image from a set of images captured by multiple cameras. Although recent Re-ID methods have made great success, most of them extract features in terms of the attributes of clothing (e.g., color, texture). However, it is common for people to wear black clothes or be captured by surveillance systems in low light illumination, in which cases the attributes of the clothing are severely missing. We call this problem the Black Re-ID problem. To solve this problem, rather than relying on the clothing information, we propose to exploi…
Scene categorization is a useful precursor task that provides prior knowledge for many advanced computer vision tasks with a broad range of applications in content-based image indexing and retrieval systems. Despite the success of data driven approaches in the field of computer vision such as object detection, semantic segmentation, etc., their application in learning high-level features for scene recognition has not achieved the same level of success. We propose to generate a fast and efficient intermediate interpretable generalized global descriptor that captures coarse features from the ima…
While the recent advances in research on video reenactment have yielded promising results, the approaches fall short in capturing the fine, detailed, and expressive facial features (e.g., lip-pressing, mouth puckering, mouth gaping, and wrinkles) which are crucial in generating realistic animated face videos. To this end, we propose an end-to-end expressive face video encoding approach that facilitates data-efficient high-quality video re-synthesis by optimizing low-dimensional edits of a single Identity-latent. The approach builds on StyleGAN2 image inversion and multi-stage non-linear latent…
ALIKED: A Lighter Keypoint and Descriptor Extraction Network via Deformable Transformation
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research（新加坡科技研究局资讯通信研究院）
Fine-grained image recognition is a challenging computer vision problem, due to the small inter-class variations caused by highly similar subordinate categories, and the large intra-class variations in poses, scales and rotations. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Mask-CNN model without the fully connected layers for fine-grained recognition. Based on the part annotations of fine-grained images, the proposed model consists of a fully convolutional network to both locate the discriminative parts (e.g., head and torso), and more importantly generate object/part masks for selecting use…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Facebook Reality Labs（Facebook现实实验室）
We present dynamic neural radiance fields for modeling the appearance and dynamics of a human face. Digitally modeling and reconstructing a talking human is a key building-block for a variety of applications. Especially, for telepresence applications in AR or VR, a faithful reproduction of the appearance including novel viewpoints or head-poses is required. In contrast to state-of-the-art approaches that model the geometry and material properties explicitly, or are purely image-based, we introduce an implicit representation of the head based on scene representation networks. To handle the dyna…
