AvatarStudio: Text-driven Editing of 3D Dynamic Human Head Avatars

Capturing and editing full head performances enables the creation of virtual characters with various applications such as extended reality and media production. The past few years witnessed a steep rise in the photorealism of human head avatars. Such avatars can be controlled through different input data modalities, including RGB, audio, depth, IMUs and others. While these data modalities provide effective means of control, they mostly focus on editing the head movements such as the facial expressions, head pose and/or camera viewpoint. In this paper, we propose AvatarStudio, a text-based method for editing the appearance of a dynamic full head avatar. Our approach builds on existing work to capture dynamic performances of human heads using neural radiance field (NeRF) and edits this representation with a text-to-image diffusion model. Specifically, we introduce an optimization strategy for incorporating multiple keyframes representing different camera viewpoints and time stamps of a video performance into a single diffusion model. Using this personalized diffusion model, we edit the dynamic NeRF by introducing view-and-time-aware Score Distillation Sampling (VT-SDS) following a model-based guidance approach. Our method edits the full head in a canonical space, and then propagates these edits to remaining time steps via a pretrained deformation network. We evaluate our method visually and numerically via a user study, and results show that our method outperforms existing approaches. Our experiments validate the design choices of our method and highlight that our edits are genuine, personalized, as well as 3D- and time-consistent.

HQ3DAvatar: High Quality Controllable 3D Head Avatar

Multi-view volumetric rendering techniques have recently shown great potential in modeling and synthesizing high-quality head avatars. A common approach to capture full head dynamic performances is to track the underlying geometry using a mesh-based template or 3D cube-based graphics primitives. While these model-based approaches achieve promising results, they often fail to learn complex geometric details such as the mouth interior, hair, and topological changes over time. This paper presents a novel approach to building highly photorealistic digital head avatars. Our method learns a canonical space via an implicit function parameterized by a neural network. It leverages multiresolution hash encoding in the learned feature space, allowing for high-quality, faster training and high-resolution rendering. At test time, our method is driven by a monocular RGB video. Here, an image encoder extracts face-specific features that also condition the learnable canonical space. This encourages deformation-dependent texture variations during training. We also propose a novel optical flow based loss that ensures correspondences in the learned canonical space, thus encouraging artifact-free and temporally consistent renderings. We show results on challenging facial expressions and show free-viewpoint renderings at interactive real-time rates for medium image resolutions. Our method outperforms all existing approaches, both visually and numerically. We will release our multiple-identity dataset to encourage further research. Our Project page is available at: https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/HQ3DAvatar/