GaussianHeads: End-to-End Learning of Drivable Gaussian Head Avatars from Coarse-to-fine Representations

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Teotia, Kartik, Kim, Hyeongwoo, Garrido, Pablo, Habermann, Marc, Elgharib, Mohamed, Theobalt, Christian
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Teotia, Kartik
Kim, Hyeongwoo
Garrido, Pablo
Habermann, Marc
Elgharib, Mohamed
Theobalt, Christian
author_facet Teotia, Kartik
Kim, Hyeongwoo
Garrido, Pablo
Habermann, Marc
Elgharib, Mohamed
Theobalt, Christian
contents Real-time rendering of human head avatars is a cornerstone of many computer graphics applications, such as augmented reality, video games, and films, to name a few. Recent approaches address this challenge with computationally efficient geometry primitives in a carefully calibrated multi-view setup. Albeit producing photorealistic head renderings, it often fails to represent complex motion changes such as the mouth interior and strongly varying head poses. We propose a new method to generate highly dynamic and deformable human head avatars from multi-view imagery in real-time. At the core of our method is a hierarchical representation of head models that allows to capture the complex dynamics of facial expressions and head movements. First, with rich facial features extracted from raw input frames, we learn to deform the coarse facial geometry of the template mesh. We then initialize 3D Gaussians on the deformed surface and refine their positions in a fine step. We train this coarse-to-fine facial avatar model along with the head pose as a learnable parameter in an end-to-end framework. This enables not only controllable facial animation via video inputs, but also high-fidelity novel view synthesis of challenging facial expressions, such as tongue deformations and fine-grained teeth structure under large motion changes. Moreover, it encourages the learned head avatar to generalize towards new facial expressions and head poses at inference time. We demonstrate the performance of our method with comparisons against the related methods on different datasets, spanning challenging facial expression sequences across multiple identities. We also show the potential application of our approach by demonstrating a cross-identity facial performance transfer application.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_11951
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GaussianHeads: End-to-End Learning of Drivable Gaussian Head Avatars from Coarse-to-fine Representations
Teotia, Kartik
Kim, Hyeongwoo
Garrido, Pablo
Habermann, Marc
Elgharib, Mohamed
Theobalt, Christian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
Real-time rendering of human head avatars is a cornerstone of many computer graphics applications, such as augmented reality, video games, and films, to name a few. Recent approaches address this challenge with computationally efficient geometry primitives in a carefully calibrated multi-view setup. Albeit producing photorealistic head renderings, it often fails to represent complex motion changes such as the mouth interior and strongly varying head poses. We propose a new method to generate highly dynamic and deformable human head avatars from multi-view imagery in real-time. At the core of our method is a hierarchical representation of head models that allows to capture the complex dynamics of facial expressions and head movements. First, with rich facial features extracted from raw input frames, we learn to deform the coarse facial geometry of the template mesh. We then initialize 3D Gaussians on the deformed surface and refine their positions in a fine step. We train this coarse-to-fine facial avatar model along with the head pose as a learnable parameter in an end-to-end framework. This enables not only controllable facial animation via video inputs, but also high-fidelity novel view synthesis of challenging facial expressions, such as tongue deformations and fine-grained teeth structure under large motion changes. Moreover, it encourages the learned head avatar to generalize towards new facial expressions and head poses at inference time. We demonstrate the performance of our method with comparisons against the related methods on different datasets, spanning challenging facial expression sequences across multiple identities. We also show the potential application of our approach by demonstrating a cross-identity facial performance transfer application.
title GaussianHeads: End-to-End Learning of Drivable Gaussian Head Avatars from Coarse-to-fine Representations
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11951