Large-Scale High-Quality 3D Gaussian Head Reconstruction from Multi-View Captures

We propose HeadsUp, a scalable feed-forward method for reconstructing high-quality 3D Gaussian heads from large-scale multi-camera setups. Our method employs an efficient encoder-decoder architecture that compresses input views into a compact latent representation. This latent representation is then decoded into a set of UV-parameterized 3D Gaussians anchored to a neutral head template. This UV representation decouples the number of 3D Gaussians from the number and resolution of input images, enabling training with many high-resolution input views. We train and evaluate our model on an internal dataset with more than 10,000 subjects, which is an order of magnitude larger than existing multi-view human head datasets. HeadsUp achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and generalizes to novel identities without test-time optimization. We extensively analyze the scaling behavior of our model across identities, views, and model capacity, revealing practical insights for quality-compute trade-offs. Finally, we highlight the strength of our latent space by showcasing two downstream applications: generating novel 3D identities and animating the 3D heads with expression blendshapes.

Neural Face Video Compression using Multiple Views

Recent advances in deep generative models led to the development of neural face video compression codecs that use an order of magnitude less bandwidth than engineered codecs. These neural codecs reconstruct the current frame by warping a source frame and using a generative model to compensate for imperfections in the warped source frame. Thereby, the warp is encoded and transmitted using a small number of keypoints rather than a dense flow field, which leads to massive savings compared to traditional codecs. However, by relying on a single source frame only, these methods lead to inaccurate reconstructions (e.g. one side of the head becomes unoccluded when turning the head and has to be synthesized). Here, we aim to tackle this issue by relying on multiple source frames (views of the face) and present encouraging results.