Learning Full-Head 3D GANs from a Single-View Portrait Dataset

33D-aware face generators are commonly trained on 2D real-life face image datasets. Nevertheless, existing facial recognition methods often struggle to extract face data captured from various camera angles. Furthermore, in-the-wild images with diverse body poses introduce a high-dimensional challenge for 3D-aware generators, making it difficult to utilize data that contains complete neck and shoulder regions. Consequently, these face image datasets often contain only near-frontal face data, which poses challenges for 3D-aware face generators to construct \textit{full-head} 3D portraits. To this end, we first create the dataset {$\it{360}^{\circ}$}-\textit{Portrait}-\textit{HQ} (\textit{$\it{360}^{\circ}$PHQ}), which consists of high-quality single-view real portraits annotated with a variety of camera parameters {(the yaw angles span the entire $360^{\circ}$ range)} and body poses. We then propose \textit{3DPortraitGAN}, the first 3D-aware full-head portrait generator that learns a canonical 3D avatar distribution from the body-pose-various \textit{$\it{360}^{\circ}$PHQ} dataset with body pose self-learning. Our model can generate view-consistent portrait images from all camera angles (${360}^{\circ}$) with a full-head 3D representation. We incorporate a mesh-guided deformation field into volumetric rendering to produce deformed results to generate portrait images that conform to the body pose distribution of the dataset using our canonical generator. We integrate two pose predictors into our framework to predict more accurate body poses to address the issue of inaccurately estimated body poses in our dataset. Our experiments show that the proposed framework can generate view-consistent, realistic portrait images with complete geometry from all camera angles and accurately predict portrait body pose.

SketchMetaFace: A Learning-based Sketching Interface for High-fidelity 3D Character Face Modeling

Modeling 3D avatars benefits various application scenarios such as AR/VR, gaming, and filming. Character faces contribute significant diversity and vividity as a vital component of avatars. However, building 3D character face models usually requires a heavy workload with commercial tools, even for experienced artists. Various existing sketch-based tools fail to support amateurs in modeling diverse facial shapes and rich geometric details. In this paper, we present SketchMetaFace - a sketching system targeting amateur users to model high-fidelity 3D faces in minutes. We carefully design both the user interface and the underlying algorithm. First, curvature-aware strokes are adopted to better support the controllability of carving facial details. Second, considering the key problem of mapping a 2D sketch map to a 3D model, we develop a novel learning-based method termed "Implicit and Depth Guided Mesh Modeling" (IDGMM). It fuses the advantages of mesh, implicit, and depth representations to achieve high-quality results with high efficiency. In addition, to further support usability, we present a coarse-to-fine 2D sketching interface design and a data-driven stroke suggestion tool. User studies demonstrate the superiority of our system over existing modeling tools in terms of the ease to use and visual quality of results. Experimental analyses also show that IDGMM reaches a better trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. SketchMetaFace is available at https://zhongjinluo.github.io/SketchMetaFace/.

Sketch2Stress: Sketching with Structural Stress Awareness

In the process of product design and digital fabrication, the structural analysis of a designed prototype is a fundamental and essential step. However, such a step is usually invisible or inaccessible to designers at the early sketching phase. This limits the user's ability to consider a shape's physical properties and structural soundness. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel approach Sketch2Stress that allows users to perform structural analysis of desired objects at the sketching stage. This method takes as input a 2D freehand sketch and one or multiple locations of user-assigned external forces. With the specially-designed two-branch generative-adversarial framework, it automatically predicts a normal map and a corresponding structural stress map distributed over the user-sketched underlying object. In this way, our method empowers designers to easily examine the stress sustained everywhere and identify potential problematic regions of their sketched object. Furthermore, combined with the predicted normal map, users are able to conduct a region-wise structural analysis efficiently by aggregating the stress effects of multiple forces in the same direction. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of our system with extensive experiments and user studies.

Sketch Beautification: Learning Part Beautification and Structure Refinement for Sketches of Man-made Objects

We present a novel freehand sketch beautification method, which takes as input a freely drawn sketch of a man-made object and automatically beautifies it both geometrically and structurally. Beautifying a sketch is challenging because of its highly abstract and heavily diverse drawing manner. Existing methods are usually confined to the distribution of their limited training samples and thus cannot beautify freely drawn sketches with rich variations. To address this challenge, we adopt a divide-and-combine strategy. Specifically, we first parse an input sketch into semantic components, beautify individual components by a learned part beautification module based on part-level implicit manifolds, and then reassemble the beautified components through a structure beautification module. With this strategy, our method can go beyond the training samples and handle novel freehand sketches. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system with extensive experiments and a perceptive study.

LPFF: A Portrait Dataset for Face Generators Across Large Poses

The creation of 2D realistic facial images and 3D face shapes using generative networks has been a hot topic in recent years. Existing face generators exhibit exceptional performance on faces in small to medium poses (with respect to frontal faces) but struggle to produce realistic results for large poses. The distorted rendering results on large poses in 3D-aware generators further show that the generated 3D face shapes are far from the distribution of 3D faces in reality. We find that the above issues are caused by the training dataset's pose imbalance. In this paper, we present LPFF, a large-pose Flickr face dataset comprised of 19,590 high-quality real large-pose portrait images. We utilize our dataset to train a 2D face generator that can process large-pose face images, as well as a 3D-aware generator that can generate realistic human face geometry. To better validate our pose-conditional 3D-aware generators, we develop a new FID measure to evaluate the 3D-level performance. Through this novel FID measure and other experiments, we show that LPFF can help 2D face generators extend their latent space and better manipulate the large-pose data, and help 3D-aware face generators achieve better view consistency and more realistic 3D reconstruction results.

NeRFFaceEditing: Disentangled Face Editing in Neural Radiance Fields

Recent methods for synthesizing 3D-aware face images have achieved rapid development thanks to neural radiance fields, allowing for high quality and fast inference speed. However, existing solutions for editing facial geometry and appearance independently usually require retraining and are not optimized for the recent work of generation, thus tending to lag behind the generation process. To address these issues, we introduce NeRFFaceEditing, which enables editing and decoupling geometry and appearance in the pretrained tri-plane-based neural radiance field while retaining its high quality and fast inference speed. Our key idea for disentanglement is to use the statistics of the tri-plane to represent the high-level appearance of its corresponding facial volume. Moreover, we leverage a generated 3D-continuous semantic mask as an intermediary for geometry editing. We devise a geometry decoder (whose output is unchanged when the appearance changes) and an appearance decoder. The geometry decoder aligns the original facial volume with the semantic mask volume. We also enhance the disentanglement by explicitly regularizing rendered images with the same appearance but different geometry to be similar in terms of color distribution for each facial component separately. Our method allows users to edit via semantic masks with decoupled control of geometry and appearance. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations show the superior geometry and appearance control abilities of our method compared to existing and alternative solutions.

LiDAL: Inter-frame Uncertainty Based Active Learning for 3D LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

We propose LiDAL, a novel active learning method for 3D LiDAR semantic segmentation by exploiting inter-frame uncertainty among LiDAR frames. Our core idea is that a well-trained model should generate robust results irrespective of viewpoints for scene scanning and thus the inconsistencies in model predictions across frames provide a very reliable measure of uncertainty for active sample selection. To implement this uncertainty measure, we introduce new inter-frame divergence and entropy formulations, which serve as the metrics for active selection. Moreover, we demonstrate additional performance gains by predicting and incorporating pseudo-labels, which are also selected using the proposed inter-frame uncertainty measure. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of LiDAL: we achieve 95% of the performance of fully supervised learning with less than 5% of annotations on the SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art active learning methods. Code release: https://github.com/hzykent/LiDAL.

MonoNeuralFusion: Online Monocular Neural 3D Reconstruction with Geometric Priors

High-fidelity 3D scene reconstruction from monocular videos continues to be challenging, especially for complete and fine-grained geometry reconstruction. The previous 3D reconstruction approaches with neural implicit representations have shown a promising ability for complete scene reconstruction, while their results are often over-smooth and lack enough geometric details. This paper introduces a novel neural implicit scene representation with volume rendering for high-fidelity online 3D scene reconstruction from monocular videos. For fine-grained reconstruction, our key insight is to incorporate geometric priors into both the neural implicit scene representation and neural volume rendering, thus leading to an effective geometry learning mechanism based on volume rendering optimization. Benefiting from this, we present MonoNeuralFusion to perform the online neural 3D reconstruction from monocular videos, by which the 3D scene geometry is efficiently generated and optimized during the on-the-fly 3D monocular scanning. The extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art approaches show that our MonoNeuralFusion consistently generates much better complete and fine-grained reconstruction results, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

DifferSketching: How Differently Do People Sketch 3D Objects?

Multiple sketch datasets have been proposed to understand how people draw 3D objects. However, such datasets are often of small scale and cover a small set of objects or categories. In addition, these datasets contain freehand sketches mostly from expert users, making it difficult to compare the drawings by expert and novice users, while such comparisons are critical in informing more effective sketch-based interfaces for either user groups. These observations motivate us to analyze how differently people with and without adequate drawing skills sketch 3D objects. We invited 70 novice users and 38 expert users to sketch 136 3D objects, which were presented as 362 images rendered from multiple views. This leads to a new dataset of 3,620 freehand multi-view sketches, which are registered with their corresponding 3D objects under certain views. Our dataset is an order of magnitude larger than the existing datasets. We analyze the collected data at three levels, i.e., sketch-level, stroke-level, and pixel-level, under both spatial and temporal characteristics, and within and across groups of creators. We found that the drawings by professionals and novices show significant differences at stroke-level, both intrinsically and extrinsically. We demonstrate the usefulness of our dataset in two applications: (i) freehand-style sketch synthesis, and (ii) posing it as a potential benchmark for sketch-based 3D reconstruction. Our dataset and code are available at https://chufengxiao.github.io/DifferSketching/.

NeuralHDHair: Automatic High-fidelity Hair Modeling from a Single Image Using Implicit Neural Representations

Undoubtedly, high-fidelity 3D hair plays an indispensable role in digital humans. However, existing monocular hair modeling methods are either tricky to deploy in digital systems (e.g., due to their dependence on complex user interactions or large databases) or can produce only a coarse geometry. In this paper, we introduce NeuralHDHair, a flexible, fully automatic system for modeling high-fidelity hair from a single image. The key enablers of our system are two carefully designed neural networks: an IRHairNet (Implicit representation for hair using neural network) for inferring high-fidelity 3D hair geometric features (3D orientation field and 3D occupancy field) hierarchically and a GrowingNet(Growing hair strands using neural network) to efficiently generate 3D hair strands in parallel. Specifically, we perform a coarse-to-fine manner and propose a novel voxel-aligned implicit function (VIFu) to represent the global hair feature, which is further enhanced by the local details extracted from a hair luminance map. To improve the efficiency of a traditional hair growth algorithm, we adopt a local neural implicit function to grow strands based on the estimated 3D hair geometric features. Extensive experiments show that our method is capable of constructing a high-fidelity 3D hair model from a single image, both efficiently and effectively, and achieves the-state-of-the-art performance.