LATENTPATCH: A Non-Parametric Approach for Face Generation and Editing

This paper presents LatentPatch, a new method for generating realistic images from a small dataset of only a few images. We use a lightweight model with only a few thousand parameters. Unlike traditional few-shot generation methods that finetune pre-trained large-scale generative models, our approach is computed directly on the latent distribution by sequential feature matching, and is explainable by design. Avoiding large models based on transformers, recursive networks, or self-attention, which are not suitable for small datasets, our method is inspired by non-parametric texture synthesis and style transfer models, and ensures that generated image features are sampled from the source distribution. We extend previous single-image models to work with a few images and demonstrate that our method can generate realistic images, as well as enable conditional sampling and image editing. We conduct experiments on face datasets and show that our simplistic model is effective and versatile.

MS-PS: A Multi-Scale Network for Photometric Stereo With a New Comprehensive Training Dataset

The photometric stereo (PS) problem consists in reconstructing the 3D-surface of an object, thanks to a set of photographs taken under different lighting directions. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale architecture for PS which, combined with a new dataset, yields state-of-the-art results. Our proposed architecture is flexible: it permits to consider a variable number of images as well as variable image size without loss of performance. In addition, we define a set of constraints to allow the generation of a relevant synthetic dataset to train convolutional neural networks for the PS problem. Our proposed dataset is much larger than pre-existing ones, and contains many objects with challenging materials having anisotropic reflectance (e.g. metals, glass). We show on publicly available benchmarks that the combination of both these contributions drastically improves the accuracy of the estimated normal field, in comparison with previous state-of-the-art methods.