Universal Facial Encoding of Codec Avatars from VR Headsets

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Bai, Shaojie, Wang, Te-Li, Li, Chenghui, Venkatesh, Akshay, Simon, Tomas, Cao, Chen, Schwartz, Gabriel, Wrench, Ryan, Saragih, Jason, Sheikh, Yaser, Wei, Shih-En
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Bai, Shaojie
Wang, Te-Li
Li, Chenghui
Venkatesh, Akshay
Simon, Tomas
Cao, Chen
Schwartz, Gabriel
Wrench, Ryan
Saragih, Jason
Sheikh, Yaser
Wei, Shih-En
author_facet Bai, Shaojie
Wang, Te-Li
Li, Chenghui
Venkatesh, Akshay
Simon, Tomas
Cao, Chen
Schwartz, Gabriel
Wrench, Ryan
Saragih, Jason
Sheikh, Yaser
Wei, Shih-En
contents Faithful real-time facial animation is essential for avatar-mediated telepresence in Virtual Reality (VR). To emulate authentic communication, avatar animation needs to be efficient and accurate: able to capture both extreme and subtle expressions within a few milliseconds to sustain the rhythm of natural conversations. The oblique and incomplete views of the face, variability in the donning of headsets, and illumination variation due to the environment are some of the unique challenges in generalization to unseen faces. In this paper, we present a method that can animate a photorealistic avatar in realtime from head-mounted cameras (HMCs) on a consumer VR headset. We present a self-supervised learning approach, based on a cross-view reconstruction objective, that enables generalization to unseen users. We present a lightweight expression calibration mechanism that increases accuracy with minimal additional cost to run-time efficiency. We present an improved parameterization for precise ground-truth generation that provides robustness to environmental variation. The resulting system produces accurate facial animation for unseen users wearing VR headsets in realtime. We compare our approach to prior face-encoding methods demonstrating significant improvements in both quantitative metrics and qualitative results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_13038
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Universal Facial Encoding of Codec Avatars from VR Headsets
Bai, Shaojie
Wang, Te-Li
Li, Chenghui
Venkatesh, Akshay
Simon, Tomas
Cao, Chen
Schwartz, Gabriel
Wrench, Ryan
Saragih, Jason
Sheikh, Yaser
Wei, Shih-En
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Faithful real-time facial animation is essential for avatar-mediated telepresence in Virtual Reality (VR). To emulate authentic communication, avatar animation needs to be efficient and accurate: able to capture both extreme and subtle expressions within a few milliseconds to sustain the rhythm of natural conversations. The oblique and incomplete views of the face, variability in the donning of headsets, and illumination variation due to the environment are some of the unique challenges in generalization to unseen faces. In this paper, we present a method that can animate a photorealistic avatar in realtime from head-mounted cameras (HMCs) on a consumer VR headset. We present a self-supervised learning approach, based on a cross-view reconstruction objective, that enables generalization to unseen users. We present a lightweight expression calibration mechanism that increases accuracy with minimal additional cost to run-time efficiency. We present an improved parameterization for precise ground-truth generation that provides robustness to environmental variation. The resulting system produces accurate facial animation for unseen users wearing VR headsets in realtime. We compare our approach to prior face-encoding methods demonstrating significant improvements in both quantitative metrics and qualitative results.
title Universal Facial Encoding of Codec Avatars from VR Headsets
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13038