We present a novel approach that enables photo-realistic re-animation of portrait videos using only an input video. In contrast to existing approaches that are restricted to manipulations of facial expressions only, we are the first to transfer the full 3D head position, head rotation, face expression, eye gaze, and eye blinking from a source actor to a portrait video of a target actor. The core of our approach is a generative neural network with a novel space-time architecture. The network takes as input synthetic renderings of a parametric face model, based on which it predicts photo-realistic video frames for a given target actor. The realism in this rendering-to-video transfer is achieved by careful adversarial training, and as a result, we can create modified target videos that mimic the behavior of the synthetically-created input. In order to enable source-to-target video re-animation, we render a synthetic target video with the reconstructed head animation parameters from a source video, and feed it into the trained network - thus taking full control of the target. With the ability to freely recombine source and target parameters, we are able to demonstrate a large variety of video rewrite applications without explicitly modeling hair, body or background. For instance, we can reenact the full head using interactive user-controlled editing, and realize high-fidelity visual dubbing. To demonstrate the high quality of our output, we conduct an extensive series of experiments and evaluations, where for instance a user study shows that our video edits are hard to detect.
Our novel monocular reconstruction approach estimates high-quality facial geometry, skin reflectance (including facial hair) and incident illumination at over 250 Hz. A trainable multi-level face representation is learned jointly with the feed forward inverse rendering network. End-to-end training is based on a self-supervised loss that requires no dense ground truth.
AbstractThe reconstruction of dense 3D models of face geometry and appearance from a single image is highly challenging and ill-posed. To constrain the problem, many approaches rely on strong priors, such as parametric face models learned from limited 3D scan data. However, prior models restrict generalization of the true diversity in facial geometry, skin reflectance and illumination. To alleviate this problem, we present the first approach that jointly learns 1) a regressor for face shape, expression, reflectance and illumination on the basis of 2) a concurrently learned parametric face model. Our multi-level face model combines the advantage of 3D Morphable Models for regularization with the out-of-space generalization of a learned corrective space. We train end-to-end on in-the-wild images without dense annotations by fusing a convolutional encoder with a differentiable expert-designed renderer and a self-supervised training loss, both defined at multiple detail levels. Our approach compares favorably to the stateof-the-art in terms of reconstruction quality, better generalizes to real world faces, and runs at over 250 Hz.
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