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Recent advances in video diffusion models have enabled realistic and controllable human image animation with temporal coherence. Although generating reasonable results, existing methods often overlook the need for regional supervision in crucial areas such as the face and hands, and neglect the explicit modeling for motion blur, leading to unrealistic low-quality synthesis. To address these limitations, we first leverage regional supervision for detailed regions to enhance face and hand faithfulness. Second, we model the motion blur explicitly to further improve the appearance quality. Third, we explore novel training strategies for high-resolution human animation to improve the overall fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving significant improvements upon the strongest baseline by more than 21.0% and 57.4% in terms of reconstruction precision (L1) and perceptual quality (FVD) on HumanDance dataset. Code and model will be made available.

We propose X-Portrait, an innovative conditional diffusion model tailored for generating expressive and temporally coherent portrait animation. Specifically, given a single portrait as appearance reference, we aim to animate it with motion derived from a driving video, capturing both highly dynamic and subtle facial expressions along with wide-range head movements. As its core, we leverage the generative prior of a pre-trained diffusion model as the rendering backbone, while achieve fine-grained head pose and expression control with novel controlling signals within the framework of ControlNet. In contrast to conventional coarse explicit controls such as facial landmarks, our motion control module is learned to interpret the dynamics directly from the original driving RGB inputs. The motion accuracy is further enhanced with a patch-based local control module that effectively enhance the motion attention to small-scale nuances like eyeball positions. Notably, to mitigate the identity leakage from the driving signals, we train our motion control modules with scaling-augmented cross-identity images, ensuring maximized disentanglement from the appearance reference modules. Experimental results demonstrate the universal effectiveness of X-Portrait across a diverse range of facial portraits and expressive driving sequences, and showcase its proficiency in generating captivating portrait animations with consistently maintained identity characteristics., Comment: SIGGRAPH 2024

The generation of emotional talking faces from a single portrait image remains a significant challenge. The simultaneous achievement of expressive emotional talking and accurate lip-sync is particularly difficult, as expressiveness is often compromised for the accuracy of lip-sync. As widely adopted by many prior works, the LSTM network often fails to capture the subtleties and variations of emotional expressions. To address these challenges, we introduce DREAM-Talk, a two-stage diffusion-based audio-driven framework, tailored for generating diverse expressions and accurate lip-sync concurrently. In the first stage, we propose EmoDiff, a novel diffusion module that generates diverse highly dynamic emotional expressions and head poses in accordance with the audio and the referenced emotion style. Given the strong correlation between lip motion and audio, we then refine the dynamics with enhanced lip-sync accuracy using audio features and emotion style. To this end, we deploy a video-to-video rendering module to transfer the expressions and lip motions from our proxy 3D avatar to an arbitrary portrait. Both quantitatively and qualitatively, DREAM-Talk outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of expressiveness, lip-sync accuracy and perceptual quality., Comment: Project Page at https://magic-research.github.io/dream-talk/

We present DiffPortrait3D, a conditional diffusion model that is capable of synthesizing 3D-consistent photo-realistic novel views from as few as a single in-the-wild portrait. Specifically, given a single RGB input, we aim to synthesize plausible but consistent facial details rendered from novel camera views with retained both identity and facial expression. In lieu of time-consuming optimization and fine-tuning, our zero-shot method generalizes well to arbitrary face portraits with unposed camera views, extreme facial expressions, and diverse artistic depictions. At its core, we leverage the generative prior of 2D diffusion models pre-trained on large-scale image datasets as our rendering backbone, while the denoising is guided with disentangled attentive control of appearance and camera pose. To achieve this, we first inject the appearance context from the reference image into the self-attention layers of the frozen UNets. The rendering view is then manipulated with a novel conditional control module that interprets the camera pose by watching a condition image of a crossed subject from the same view. Furthermore, we insert a trainable cross-view attention module to enhance view consistency, which is further strengthened with a novel 3D-aware noise generation process during inference. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results both qualitatively and quantitatively on our challenging in-the-wild and multi-view benchmarks.

In this work, we propose MagicPose, a diffusion-based model for 2D human pose and facial expression retargeting. Specifically, given a reference image, we aim to generate a person's new images by controlling the poses and facial expressions while keeping the identity unchanged. To this end, we propose a two-stage training strategy to disentangle human motions and appearance (e.g., facial expressions, skin tone and dressing), consisting of (1) the pre-training of an appearance-control block and (2) learning appearance-disentangled pose control. Our novel design enables robust appearance control over generated human images, including body, facial attributes, and even background. By leveraging the prior knowledge of image diffusion models, MagicPose generalizes well to unseen human identities and complex poses without the need for additional fine-tuning. Moreover, the proposed model is easy to use and can be considered as a plug-in module/extension to Stable Diffusion. The code is available at: https://github.com/Boese0601/MagicDance, Comment: Accepted by ICML 2024. MagicPose and MagicDance are the same project. Website:https://boese0601.github.io/magicdance/ Code:https://github.com/Boese0601/MagicDance

We study the problem of 3D-aware full-body human generation, aiming at creating animatable human avatars with high-quality textures and geometries. Generally, two challenges remain in this field: i) existing methods struggle to generate geometries with rich realistic details such as the wrinkles of garments; ii) they typically utilize volumetric radiance fields and neural renderers in the synthesis process, making high-resolution rendering non-trivial. To overcome these problems, we propose GETAvatar, a Generative model that directly generates Explicit Textured 3D meshes for animatable human Avatar, with photo-realistic appearance and fine geometric details. Specifically, we first design an articulated 3D human representation with explicit surface modeling, and enrich the generated humans with realistic surface details by learning from the 2D normal maps of 3D scan data. Second, with the explicit mesh representation, we can use a rasterization-based renderer to perform surface rendering, allowing us to achieve high-resolution image generation efficiently. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GETAvatar achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3D-aware human generation both in appearance and geometry quality. Notably, GETAvatar can generate images at 512x512 resolution with 17FPS and 1024x1024 resolution with 14FPS, improving upon previous methods by 2x. Our code and models will be available., Comment: Accepted by ICCV2023. Project Page: https://getavatar.github.io/

Automatic detection of facial Action Units (AUs) allows for objective facial expression analysis. Due to the high cost of AU labeling and the limited size of existing benchmarks, previous AU detection methods tend to overfit the dataset, resulting in a significant performance loss when evaluated across corpora. To address this problem, we propose FG-Net for generalizable facial action unit detection. Specifically, FG-Net extracts feature maps from a StyleGAN2 model pre-trained on a large and diverse face image dataset. Then, these features are used to detect AUs with a Pyramid CNN Interpreter, making the training efficient and capturing essential local features. The proposed FG-Net achieves a strong generalization ability for heatmap-based AU detection thanks to the generalizable and semantic-rich features extracted from the pre-trained generative model. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate within- and cross-corpus AU detection with the widely-used DISFA and BP4D datasets. Compared with the state-of-the-art, the proposed method achieves superior cross-domain performance while maintaining competitive within-domain performance. In addition, FG-Net is data-efficient and achieves competitive performance even when trained on 1000 samples. Our code will be released at \url{https://github.com/ihp-lab/FG-Net}

We present OmniAvatar, a novel geometry-guided 3D head synthesis model trained from in-the-wild unstructured images that is capable of synthesizing diverse identity-preserved 3D heads with compelling dynamic details under full disentangled control over camera poses, facial expressions, head shapes, articulated neck and jaw poses. To achieve such high level of disentangled control, we first explicitly define a novel semantic signed distance function (SDF) around a head geometry (FLAME) conditioned on the control parameters. This semantic SDF allows us to build a differentiable volumetric correspondence map from the observation space to a disentangled canonical space from all the control parameters. We then leverage the 3D-aware GAN framework (EG3D) to synthesize detailed shape and appearance of 3D full heads in the canonical space, followed by a volume rendering step guided by the volumetric correspondence map to output into the observation space. To ensure the control accuracy on the synthesized head shapes and expressions, we introduce a geometry prior loss to conform to head SDF and a control loss to conform to the expression code. Further, we enhance the temporal realism with dynamic details conditioned upon varying expressions and joint poses. Our model can synthesize more preferable identity-preserved 3D heads with compelling dynamic details compared to the state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. We also provide an ablation study to justify many of our system design choices.

We propose PAniC-3D, a system to reconstruct stylized 3D character heads directly from illustrated (p)ortraits of (ani)me (c)haracters. Our anime-style domain poses unique challenges to single-view reconstruction; compared to natural images of human heads, character portrait illustrations have hair and accessories with more complex and diverse geometry, and are shaded with non-photorealistic contour lines. In addition, there is a lack of both 3D model and portrait illustration data suitable to train and evaluate this ambiguous stylized reconstruction task. Facing these challenges, our proposed PAniC-3D architecture crosses the illustration-to-3D domain gap with a line-filling model, and represents sophisticated geometries with a volumetric radiance field. We train our system with two large new datasets (11.2k Vroid 3D models, 1k Vtuber portrait illustrations), and evaluate on a novel AnimeRecon benchmark of illustration-to-3D pairs. PAniC-3D significantly outperforms baseline methods, and provides data to establish the task of stylized reconstruction from portrait illustrations., Comment: CVPR 2023, code release: https://github.com/ShuhongChen/panic3d-anime-reconstruction

While substantial progresses have been made in automated 2D portrait stylization, admirable 3D portrait stylization from a single user photo remains to be an unresolved challenge. One primary obstacle here is the lack of high quality stylized 3D training data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework \emph{AgileGAN3D} that can produce 3D artistically appealing and personalized portraits with detailed geometry. New stylization can be obtained with just a few (around 20) unpaired 2D exemplars. We achieve this by first leveraging existing 2D stylization capabilities, \emph{style prior creation}, to produce a large amount of augmented 2D style exemplars. These augmented exemplars are generated with accurate camera pose labels, as well as paired real face images, which prove to be critical for the downstream 3D stylization task. Capitalizing on the recent advancement of 3D-aware GAN models, we perform \emph{guided transfer learning} on a pretrained 3D GAN generator to produce multi-view-consistent stylized renderings. In order to achieve 3D GAN inversion that can preserve subject's identity well, we incorporate \emph{multi-view consistency loss} in the training of our encoder. Our pipeline demonstrates strong capability in turning user photos into a diverse range of 3D artistic portraits. Both qualitative results and quantitative evaluations have been conducted to show the superior performance of our method. Code and pretrained models will be released for reproduction purpose.

Synthesis and reconstruction of 3D human head has gained increasing interests in computer vision and computer graphics recently. Existing state-of-the-art 3D generative adversarial networks (GANs) for 3D human head synthesis are either limited to near-frontal views or hard to preserve 3D consistency in large view angles. We propose PanoHead, the first 3D-aware generative model that enables high-quality view-consistent image synthesis of full heads in $360^\circ$ with diverse appearance and detailed geometry using only in-the-wild unstructured images for training. At its core, we lift up the representation power of recent 3D GANs and bridge the data alignment gap when training from in-the-wild images with widely distributed views. Specifically, we propose a novel two-stage self-adaptive image alignment for robust 3D GAN training. We further introduce a tri-grid neural volume representation that effectively addresses front-face and back-head feature entanglement rooted in the widely-adopted tri-plane formulation. Our method instills prior knowledge of 2D image segmentation in adversarial learning of 3D neural scene structures, enabling compositable head synthesis in diverse backgrounds. Benefiting from these designs, our method significantly outperforms previous 3D GANs, generating high-quality 3D heads with accurate geometry and diverse appearances, even with long wavy and afro hairstyles, renderable from arbitrary poses. Furthermore, we show that our system can reconstruct full 3D heads from single input images for personalized realistic 3D avatars., Comment: CVPR 2023. Project Page:https://sizhean.github.io/panohead

Unsupervised generation of 3D-aware clothed humans with various appearances and controllable geometries is important for creating virtual human avatars and other AR/VR applications. Existing methods are either limited to rigid object modeling, or not generative and thus unable to generate high-quality virtual humans and animate them. In this work, we propose AvatarGen, the first method that enables not only geometry-aware clothed human synthesis with high-fidelity appearances but also disentangled human animation controllability, while only requiring 2D images for training. Specifically, we decompose the generative 3D human synthesis into pose-guided mapping and canonical representation with predefined human pose and shape, such that the canonical representation can be explicitly driven to different poses and shapes with the guidance of a 3D parametric human model SMPL. AvatarGen further introduces a deformation network to learn non-rigid deformations for modeling fine-grained geometric details and pose-dependent dynamics. To improve the geometry quality of the generated human avatars, it leverages the signed distance field as geometric proxy, which allows more direct regularization from the 3D geometric priors of SMPL. Benefiting from these designs, our method can generate animatable 3D human avatars with high-quality appearance and geometry modeling, significantly outperforming previous 3D GANs. Furthermore, it is competent for many applications, e.g., single-view reconstruction, re-animation, and text-guided synthesis/editing. Code and pre-trained model will be available at http://jeff95.me/projects/avatargen.html., Comment: First two authors contributed equally. Our code and models will be available at http://jeff95.me/projects/avatargen.html. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2208.00561

Stylized 3D avatars have become increasingly prominent in our modern life. Creating these avatars manually usually involves laborious selection and adjustment of continuous and discrete parameters and is time-consuming for average users. Self-supervised approaches to automatically create 3D avatars from user selfies promise high quality with little annotation cost but fall short in application to stylized avatars due to a large style domain gap. We propose a novel self-supervised learning framework to create high-quality stylized 3D avatars with a mix of continuous and discrete parameters. Our cascaded domain bridging framework first leverages a modified portrait stylization approach to translate input selfies into stylized avatar renderings as the targets for desired 3D avatars. Next, we find the best parameters of the avatars to match the stylized avatar renderings through a differentiable imitator we train to mimic the avatar graphics engine. To ensure we can effectively optimize the discrete parameters, we adopt a cascaded relaxation-and-search pipeline. We use a human preference study to evaluate how well our method preserves user identity compared to previous work as well as manual creation. Our results achieve much higher preference scores than previous work and close to those of manual creation. We also provide an ablation study to justify the design choices in our pipeline., Comment: ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 Conference Proceedings

We present a framework that uses GAN-augmented images to complement certain specific attributes, usually underrepresented, for machine learning model training. This allows us to improve inference quality over those attributes for the facial recognition tasks., Comment: CHI 2022 Workshop: AI-Generated Characters: Putting Deepfakes to Good Use

PICNet pioneered the generation of multiple and diverse results for image completion task, but it required a careful balance between $\mathcal{KL}$ loss (diversity) and reconstruction loss (quality), resulting in a limited diversity and quality . Separately, iGPT-based architecture has been employed to infer distributions in a discrete space derived from a pixel-level pre-clustered palette, which however cannot generate high-quality results directly. In this work, we present a novel framework for pluralistic image completion that can achieve both high quality and diversity at much faster inference speed. The core of our design lies in a simple yet effective code sharing mechanism that leads to a very compact yet expressive image representation in a discrete latent domain. The compactness and the richness of the representation further facilitate the subsequent deployment of a transformer to effectively learn how to composite and complete a masked image at the discrete code domain. Based on the global context well-captured by the transformer and the available visual regions, we are able to sample all tokens simultaneously, which is completely different from the prevailing autoregressive approach of iGPT-based works, and leads to more than 100$\times$ faster inference speed. Experiments show that our framework is able to learn semantically-rich discrete codes efficiently and robustly, resulting in much better image reconstruction quality. Our diverse image completion framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art both quantitatively and qualitatively on multiple benchmark datasets., Comment: 12 pages, 15 figures

We present a neural-based model for relighting a half-body portrait image by simply referring to another portrait image with the desired lighting condition. Rather than following classical inverse rendering methodology that involves estimating normals, albedo and environment maps, we implicitly encode the subject and lighting in a latent space, and use these latent codes to generate relighted images by neural rendering. A key technical innovation is the use of a novel overcomplete lighting representation, which facilitates lighting interpolation in the latent space, as well as helping regularize the self-organization of the lighting latent space during training. In addition, we propose a novel multiplicative neural render that more effectively combines the subject and lighting latent codes for rendering. We also created a large-scale photorealistic rendered relighting dataset for training, which allows our model to generalize well to real images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our system not only outperforms existing methods for referral-based portrait relighting, but also has the capability generate sequences of relighted images via lighting rotations.

Existing scene understanding systems mainly focus on recognizing the visible parts of a scene, ignoring the intact appearance of physical objects in the real-world. Concurrently, image completion has aimed to create plausible appearance for the invisible regions, but requires a manual mask as input. In this work, we propose a higher-level scene understanding system to tackle both visible and invisible parts of objects and backgrounds in a given scene. Particularly, we built a system to decompose a scene into individual objects, infer their underlying occlusion relationships, and even automatically learn which parts of the objects are occluded that need to be completed. In order to disentangle the occluded relationships of all objects in a complex scene, we use the fact that the front object without being occluded is easy to be identified, detected, and segmented. Our system interleaves the two tasks of instance segmentation and scene completion through multiple iterations, solving for objects layer-by-layer. We first provide a thorough experiment using a new realistically rendered dataset with ground-truths for all invisible regions. To bridge the domain gap to real imagery where ground-truths are unavailable, we then train another model with the pseudo-ground-truths generated from our trained synthesis model. We demonstrate results on a wide variety of datasets and show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art., Comment: 20 pages, 16 pages

Automatic facial action unit (AU) recognition has attracted great attention but still remains a challenging task, as subtle changes of local facial muscles are difficult to thoroughly capture. Most existing AU recognition approaches leverage geometry information in a straightforward 2D or 3D manner, which either ignore 3D manifold information or suffer from high computational costs. In this paper, we propose a novel geodesic guided convolution (GeoConv) for AU recognition by embedding 3D manifold information into 2D convolutions. Specifically, the kernel of GeoConv is weighted by our introduced geodesic weights, which are negatively correlated to geodesic distances on a coarsely reconstructed 3D face model. Moreover, based on GeoConv, we further develop an end-to-end trainable framework named GeoCNN for AU recognition. Extensive experiments on BP4D and DISFA benchmarks show that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art AU recognition methods., Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures

While the problem of estimating shapes and diffuse reflectances of human faces from images has been extensively studied, there is relatively less work done on recovering the specular albedo. This paper presents a lightweight solution for inferring photorealistic facial reflectance and geometry. Our system processes video streams from two views of a subject, and outputs two reflectance maps for diffuse and specular albedos, as well as a vector map of surface normals. A model-based optimization approach is used, consisting of the three stages of multi-view face model fitting, facial reflectance inference and facial geometry refinement. Our approach is based on a novel formulation built upon the 3D morphable model (3DMM) for representing 3D textured faces in conjunction with the Blinn-Phong reflection model. It has the advantage of requiring only a simple setup with two video streams, and is able to exploit the interaction between the diffuse and specular reflections across multiple views as well as time frames. As a result, the method is able to reliably recover high-fidelity facial reflectance and geometry, which facilitates various applications such as generating photorealistic facial images under new viewpoints or illumination conditions.

Teleconference or telepresence based on virtual reality (VR) headmount display (HMD) device is a very interesting and promising application since HMD can provide immersive feelings for users. However, in order to facilitate face-to-face communications for HMD users, real-time 3D facial performance capture of a person wearing HMD is needed, which is a very challenging task due to the large occlusion caused by HMD. The existing limited solutions are very complex either in setting or in approach as well as lacking the performance capture of 3D eye gaze movement. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) based solution for real-time 3D face-eye performance capture of HMD users without complex modification to devices. To address the issue of lacking training data, we generate massive pairs of HMD face-label dataset by data synthesis as well as collecting VR-IR eye dataset from multiple subjects. Then, we train a dense-fitting network for facial region and an eye gaze network to regress 3D eye model parameters. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our system can efficiently and effectively produce in real time a vivid personalized 3D avatar with the correct identity, pose, expression and eye motion corresponding to the HMD user., Comment: ACM Multimedia Conference 2018

Employing deep learning-based approaches for fine-grained facial expression analysis, such as those involving the estimation of Action Unit (AU) intensities, is difficult due to the lack of a large-scale dataset of real faces with sufficiently diverse AU labels for training. In this paper, we consider how AU-level facial image synthesis can be used to substantially augment such a dataset. We propose an AU synthesis framework that combines the well-known 3D Morphable Model (3DMM), which intrinsically disentangles expression parameters from other face attributes, with models that adversarially generate 3DMM expression parameters conditioned on given target AU labels, in contrast to the more conventional approach of generating facial images directly. In this way, we are able to synthesize new combinations of expression parameters and facial images from desired AU labels. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results on the benchmark DISFA dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on 3DMM facial expression parameter synthesis and data augmentation for deep learning-based AU intensity estimation.