No abstract

Generative models have proved to be useful tools to represent 3D human faces and their statistical variations. With the increase of 3D scan databases available for training, a growing challenge lies in the ability to learn generative face models that effectively encode shape variations with respect to desired attributes, such as identity and expression, given datasets that can be diverse. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing a framework that learns a generative 3D face model using an autoencoder architecture, allowing hence for weakly supervised training. The main contribution is to combine a convolutional neural network-based encoder with a multilinear model-based decoder, taking therefore advantage of both the convolutional network robustness to corrupted and incomplete data, and of the multilinear model capacity to effectively model and decouple shape variations. Given a set of 3D face scans with annotation labels for the desired attributes, e.g. identities and expressions, our method learns an expressive multilinear model that decouples shape changes due to the different factors. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms recent approaches when learning multilinear face models from incomplete training data, particularly in terms of space decoupling, and that it is capable of learning from an order of magnitude more data than previous methods.

We present an approach for estimating surface normals from in-the-wild color images of faces. While datadriven strategies have been proposed for single face images, limited available ground truth data makes this problem difficult. To alleviate this issue, we propose a method that can leverage all available image and normal data, whether paired or not, thanks to a novel cross-modal learning architecture. In particular, we enable additional training with single modality data, either color or normal, by using two encoder-decoder networks with a shared latent space. The proposed architecture also enables face details to be transferred between the image and normal domains, given paired data, through skip connections between the image encoder and normal decoder. Core to our approach is a novel module that we call deactivable skip connections, which allows integrating both the auto-encoded and imageto-normal branches within the same architecture that can be trained end-to-end. This allows learning of a rich latent space that can accurately capture the normal information. We compare against state-of-the-art methods and show that our approach can achieve significant improvements, both quantitative and qualitative, with natural face images.