SurFhead: Affine Rig Blending for Geometrically Accurate 2D Gaussian Surfel Head Avatars

Recent advancements in head avatar rendering using Gaussian primitives have achieved significantly high-fidelity results. Although precise head geometry is crucial for applications like mesh reconstruction and relighting, current methods struggle to capture intricate geometric details and render unseen poses due to their reliance on similarity transformations, which cannot handle stretch and shear transforms essential for detailed deformations of geometry. To address this, we propose SurFhead, a novel method that reconstructs riggable head geometry from RGB videos using 2D Gaussian surfels, which offer well-defined geometric properties, such as precise depth from fixed ray intersections and normals derived from their surface orientation, making them advantageous over 3D counterparts. SurFhead ensures high-fidelity rendering of both normals and images, even in extreme poses, by leveraging classical mesh-based deformation transfer and affine transformation interpolation. SurFhead introduces precise geometric deformation and blends surfels through polar decomposition of transformations, including those affecting normals. Our key contribution lies in bridging classical graphics techniques, such as mesh-based deformation, with modern Gaussian primitives, achieving state-of-the-art geometry reconstruction and rendering quality. Unlike previous avatar rendering approaches, SurFhead enables efficient reconstruction driven by Gaussian primitives while preserving high-fidelity geometry.

Effective Rank Analysis and Regularization for Enhanced 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D reconstruction from multi-view images is one of the fundamental challenges in computer vision and graphics. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a promising technique capable of real-time rendering with high-quality 3D reconstruction. This method utilizes 3D Gaussian representation and tile-based splatting techniques, bypassing the expensive neural field querying. Despite its potential, 3DGS encounters challenges, including needle-like artifacts, suboptimal geometries, and inaccurate normals, due to the Gaussians converging into anisotropic Gaussians with one dominant variance. We propose using effective rank analysis to examine the shape statistics of 3D Gaussian primitives, and identify the Gaussians indeed converge into needle-like shapes with the effective rank 1. To address this, we introduce effective rank as a regularization, which constrains the structure of the Gaussians. Our new regularization method enhances normal and geometry reconstruction while reducing needle-like artifacts. The approach can be integrated as an add-on module to other 3DGS variants, improving their quality without compromising visual fidelity.

SelfSwapper: Self-Supervised Face Swapping via Shape Agnostic Masked AutoEncoder

Face swapping has gained significant attention for its varied applications. The majority of previous face swapping approaches have relied on the seesaw game training scheme, which often leads to the instability of the model training and results in undesired samples with blended identities due to the target identity leakage problem. This paper introduces the Shape Agnostic Masked AutoEncoder (SAMAE) training scheme, a novel self-supervised approach designed to enhance face swapping model training. Our training scheme addresses the limitations of traditional training methods by circumventing the conventional seesaw game and introducing clear ground truth through its self-reconstruction training regime. It effectively mitigates identity leakage by masking facial regions of the input images and utilizing learned disentangled identity and non-identity features. Additionally, we tackle the shape misalignment problem with new techniques including perforation confusion and random mesh scaling, and establishes a new state-of-the-art, surpassing other baseline methods, preserving both identity and non-identity attributes, without sacrificing on either aspect.

MagiCapture: High-Resolution Multi-Concept Portrait Customization

Large-scale text-to-image models including Stable Diffusion are capable of generating high-fidelity photorealistic portrait images. There is an active research area dedicated to personalizing these models, aiming to synthesize specific subjects or styles using provided sets of reference images. However, despite the plausible results from these personalization methods, they tend to produce images that often fall short of realism and are not yet on a commercially viable level. This is particularly noticeable in portrait image generation, where any unnatural artifact in human faces is easily discernible due to our inherent human bias. To address this, we introduce MagiCapture, a personalization method for integrating subject and style concepts to generate high-resolution portrait images using just a few subject and style references. For instance, given a handful of random selfies, our fine-tuned model can generate high-quality portrait images in specific styles, such as passport or profile photos. The main challenge with this task is the absence of ground truth for the composed concepts, leading to a reduction in the quality of the final output and an identity shift of the source subject. To address these issues, we present a novel Attention Refocusing loss coupled with auxiliary priors, both of which facilitate robust learning within this weakly supervised learning setting. Our pipeline also includes additional post-processing steps to ensure the creation of highly realistic outputs. MagiCapture outperforms other baselines in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations and can also be generalized to other non-human objects.

Text2Control3D: Controllable 3D Avatar Generation in Neural Radiance Fields using Geometry-Guided Text-to-Image Diffusion Model

Recent advances in diffusion models such as ControlNet have enabled geometrically controllable, high-fidelity text-to-image generation. However, none of them addresses the question of adding such controllability to text-to-3D generation. In response, we propose Text2Control3D, a controllable text-to-3D avatar generation method whose facial expression is controllable given a monocular video casually captured with hand-held camera. Our main strategy is to construct the 3D avatar in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) optimized with a set of controlled viewpoint-aware images that we generate from ControlNet, whose condition input is the depth map extracted from the input video. When generating the viewpoint-aware images, we utilize cross-reference attention to inject well-controlled, referential facial expression and appearance via cross attention. We also conduct low-pass filtering of Gaussian latent of the diffusion model in order to ameliorate the viewpoint-agnostic texture problem we observed from our empirical analysis, where the viewpoint-aware images contain identical textures on identical pixel positions that are incomprehensible in 3D. Finally, to train NeRF with the images that are viewpoint-aware yet are not strictly consistent in geometry, our approach considers per-image geometric variation as a view of deformation from a shared 3D canonical space. Consequently, we construct the 3D avatar in a canonical space of deformable NeRF by learning a set of per-image deformation via deformation field table. We demonstrate the empirical results and discuss the effectiveness of our method.

FaceCLIPNeRF: Text-driven 3D Face Manipulation using Deformable Neural Radiance Fields

As recent advances in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have enabled high-fidelity 3D face reconstruction and novel view synthesis, its manipulation also became an essential task in 3D vision. However, existing manipulation methods require extensive human labor, such as a user-provided semantic mask and manual attribute search unsuitable for non-expert users. Instead, our approach is designed to require a single text to manipulate a face reconstructed with NeRF. To do so, we first train a scene manipulator, a latent code-conditional deformable NeRF, over a dynamic scene to control a face deformation using the latent code. However, representing a scene deformation with a single latent code is unfavorable for compositing local deformations observed in different instances. As so, our proposed Position-conditional Anchor Compositor (PAC) learns to represent a manipulated scene with spatially varying latent codes. Their renderings with the scene manipulator are then optimized to yield high cosine similarity to a target text in CLIP embedding space for text-driven manipulation. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to address the text-driven manipulation of a face reconstructed with NeRF. Extensive results, comparisons, and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

PixelHuman: Animatable Neural Radiance Fields from Few Images

In this paper, we propose PixelHuman, a novel human rendering model that generates animatable human scenes from a few images of a person with unseen identity, views, and poses. Previous work have demonstrated reasonable performance in novel view and pose synthesis, but they rely on a large number of images to train and are trained per scene from videos, which requires significant amount of time to produce animatable scenes from unseen human images. Our method differs from existing methods in that it can generalize to any input image for animatable human synthesis. Given a random pose sequence, our method synthesizes each target scene using a neural radiance field that is conditioned on a canonical representation and pose-aware pixel-aligned features, both of which can be obtained through deformation fields learned in a data-driven manner. Our experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiview and novel pose synthesis from few-shot images.

Local 3D Editing via 3D Distillation of CLIP Knowledge

3D content manipulation is an important computer vision task with many real-world applications (e.g., product design, cartoon generation, and 3D Avatar editing). Recently proposed 3D GANs can generate diverse photorealistic 3D-aware contents using Neural Radiance fields (NeRF). However, manipulation of NeRF still remains a challenging problem since the visual quality tends to degrade after manipulation and suboptimal control handles such as 2D semantic maps are used for manipulations. While text-guided manipulations have shown potential in 3D editing, such approaches often lack locality. To overcome these problems, we propose Local Editing NeRF (LENeRF), which only requires text inputs for fine-grained and localized manipulation. Specifically, we present three add-on modules of LENeRF, the Latent Residual Mapper, the Attention Field Network, and the Deformation Network, which are jointly used for local manipulations of 3D features by estimating a 3D attention field. The 3D attention field is learned in an unsupervised way, by distilling the zero-shot mask generation capability of CLIP to the 3D space with multi-view guidance. We conduct diverse experiments and thorough evaluations both quantitatively and qualitatively.