Synthetic Prior for Few-Shot Drivable Head Avatar Inversion

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zielonka, Wojciech, Garbin, Stephan J., Lattas, Alexandros, Kopanas, George, Gotardo, Paulo, Beeler, Thabo, Thies, Justus, Bolkart, Timo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zielonka, Wojciech
Garbin, Stephan J.
Lattas, Alexandros
Kopanas, George
Gotardo, Paulo
Beeler, Thabo
Thies, Justus
Bolkart, Timo
author_facet Zielonka, Wojciech
Garbin, Stephan J.
Lattas, Alexandros
Kopanas, George
Gotardo, Paulo
Beeler, Thabo
Thies, Justus
Bolkart, Timo
contents We present SynShot, a novel method for the few-shot inversion of a drivable head avatar based on a synthetic prior. We tackle three major challenges. First, training a controllable 3D generative network requires a large number of diverse sequences, for which pairs of images and high-quality tracked meshes are not always available. Second, the use of real data is strictly regulated (e.g., under the General Data Protection Regulation, which mandates frequent deletion of models and data to accommodate a situation when a participant's consent is withdrawn). Synthetic data, free from these constraints, is an appealing alternative. Third, state-of-the-art monocular avatar models struggle to generalize to new views and expressions, lacking a strong prior and often overfitting to a specific viewpoint distribution. Inspired by machine learning models trained solely on synthetic data, we propose a method that learns a prior model from a large dataset of synthetic heads with diverse identities, expressions, and viewpoints. With few input images, SynShot fine-tunes the pretrained synthetic prior to bridge the domain gap, modeling a photorealistic head avatar that generalizes to novel expressions and viewpoints. We model the head avatar using 3D Gaussian splatting and a convolutional encoder-decoder that outputs Gaussian parameters in UV texture space. To account for the different modeling complexities over parts of the head (e.g., skin vs hair), we embed the prior with explicit control for upsampling the number of per-part primitives. Compared to SOTA monocular and GAN-based methods, SynShot significantly improves novel view and expression synthesis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_06903
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Synthetic Prior for Few-Shot Drivable Head Avatar Inversion
Zielonka, Wojciech
Garbin, Stephan J.
Lattas, Alexandros
Kopanas, George
Gotardo, Paulo
Beeler, Thabo
Thies, Justus
Bolkart, Timo
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We present SynShot, a novel method for the few-shot inversion of a drivable head avatar based on a synthetic prior. We tackle three major challenges. First, training a controllable 3D generative network requires a large number of diverse sequences, for which pairs of images and high-quality tracked meshes are not always available. Second, the use of real data is strictly regulated (e.g., under the General Data Protection Regulation, which mandates frequent deletion of models and data to accommodate a situation when a participant's consent is withdrawn). Synthetic data, free from these constraints, is an appealing alternative. Third, state-of-the-art monocular avatar models struggle to generalize to new views and expressions, lacking a strong prior and often overfitting to a specific viewpoint distribution. Inspired by machine learning models trained solely on synthetic data, we propose a method that learns a prior model from a large dataset of synthetic heads with diverse identities, expressions, and viewpoints. With few input images, SynShot fine-tunes the pretrained synthetic prior to bridge the domain gap, modeling a photorealistic head avatar that generalizes to novel expressions and viewpoints. We model the head avatar using 3D Gaussian splatting and a convolutional encoder-decoder that outputs Gaussian parameters in UV texture space. To account for the different modeling complexities over parts of the head (e.g., skin vs hair), we embed the prior with explicit control for upsampling the number of per-part primitives. Compared to SOTA monocular and GAN-based methods, SynShot significantly improves novel view and expression synthesis.
title Synthetic Prior for Few-Shot Drivable Head Avatar Inversion
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06903