Generating realistic 3D faces is of high importance for computer graphics and computer vision applications. Generally, research on 3D face generation revolves around linear statistical models of the facial surface. Nevertheless, these models cannot represent faithfully either the facial texture or the normals of the face, which are very crucial for photo-realistic face synthesis. Recently, it was demonstrated that Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can be used for generating high-quality textures of faces. Nevertheless, the generation process either omits the geometry and normals, or independent processes are used to produce 3D shape information. In this paper, we present the first methodology that generates high-quality texture, shape, and normals jointly, which can be used for photo-realistic synthesis. To do so, we propose a novel GAN that can generate data from different modalities while exploiting their correlations. Furthermore, we demonstrate how we can condition the generation on the expression and create faces with various facial expressions. The qualitative results shown in this pre-print is compressed due to size limitations, full resolution results and the accompanying video can be found at the project page: https://github.com/barisgecer/TBGAN.
Over the past few years, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have garnered increased interest among researchers in Computer Vision, with applications including, but not limited to, image generation, translation, imputation, and super-resolution. Nevertheless, no GAN-based method has been proposed in the literature that can successfully represent, generate or translate 3D facial shapes (meshes). This can be primarily attributed to two facts, namely that (a) publicly available 3D face databases are scarce as well as limited in terms of sample size and variability (e.g., few subjects, little diversity in race and gender), and (b) mesh convolutions for deep networks present several challenges that are not entirely tackled in the literature, leading to operator approximations and model instability, often failing to preserve high-frequency components of the distribution. As a result, linear methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) have been mainly utilized towards 3D shape analysis, despite being unable to capture non-linearities and high frequency details of the 3D face - such as eyelid and lip variations. In this work, we present 3DFaceGAN, the first GAN tailored towards modeling the distribution of 3D facial surfaces, while retaining the high frequency details of 3D face shapes. We conduct an extensive series of both qualitative and quantitative experiments, where the merits of 3DFaceGAN are clearly demonstrated against other, state-of-the-art methods in tasks such as 3D shape representation, generation, and translation.
Generative models for 3D geometric data arise in many important applications in 3D computer vision and graphics. In this paper, we focus on 3D deformable shapes that share a common topological structure, such as human faces and bodies. Morphable Models were among the first attempts to create compact representations for such shapes; despite their effectiveness and simplicity, such models have limited representation power due to their linear formulation. Recently, non-linear learnable methods have been proposed, although most of them resort to intermediate representations, such as 3D grids of voxels or 2D views. In this paper, we introduce a convolutional mesh autoencoder and a GAN architecture based on the spiral convolutional operator, acting directly on the mesh and leveraging its underlying geometric structure. We provide an analysis of our convolution operator and demonstrate state-of-the-art results on 3D shape datasets compared to the linear Morphable Model and the recently proposed COMA model.
In the past few years, a lot of work has been done towards reconstructing the 3D facial structure from single images by capitalizing on the power of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs). In the most recent works, differentiable renderers were employed in order to learn the relationship between the facial identity features and the parameters of a 3D morphable model for shape and texture. The texture features either correspond to components of a linear texture space or are learned by auto-encoders directly from in-the-wild images. In all cases, the quality of the facial texture reconstruction of the state-of-the-art methods is still not capable of modeling textures in high fidelity. In this paper, we take a radically different approach and harness the power of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and DCNNs in order to reconstruct the facial texture and shape from single images. That is, we utilize GANs to train a very powerful generator of facial texture in UV space. Then, we revisit the original 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) fitting approaches making use of non-linear optimization to find the optimal latent parameters that best reconstruct the test image but under a new perspective. We optimize the parameters with the supervision of pretrained deep identity features through our end-to-end differentiable framework. We demonstrate excellent results in photorealistic and identity preserving 3D face reconstructions and achieve for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, facial texture reconstruction with high-frequency details.
Three-dimensional Morphable Models (3DMMs) are powerful statistical tools for representing the 3D surfaces of an object class. In this context, we identify an interesting question that has previously not received research attention: is it possible to combine two or more 3DMMs that (a) are built using different templates that perhaps only partly overlap, (b) have different representation capabilities and (c) are built from different datasets that may not be publicly-available? In answering this question, we make two contributions. First, we propose two methods for solving this problem: i. use a regressor to complete missing parts of one model using the other, ii. use the Gaussian Process framework to blend covariance matrices from multiple models. Second, as an example application of our approach, we build a new face-and-head shape model that combines the variability and facial detail of the LSFM with the full head modelling of the LYHM. The resulting combined shape model achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms existing head models by a large margin. Finally, as an application experiment, we reconstruct full head representations from single, unconstrained images by utilizing our proposed large-scale model in conjunction with the FaceWarehouse blendshapes for handling expressions.
3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) are powerful statistical models of 3D facial shape and texture, and among the state-of-the-art methods for reconstructing facial shape from single images. With the advent of new 3D sensors, many 3D facial datasets have been collected containing both neutral as well as expressive faces. However, all datasets are captured under controlled conditions. Thus, even though powerful 3D facial shape models can be learnt from such data, it is difficult to build statistical texture models that are sufficient to reconstruct faces captured in unconstrained conditions ("in-the-wild"). In this paper, we propose the first, to the best of our knowledge, "in-the-wild" 3DMM by combining a powerful statistical model of facial shape, which describes both identity and expression, with an "in-the-wild" texture model. We show that the employment of such an "in-the-wild" texture model greatly simplifies the fitting procedure, because there is no need to optimize with regards to the illumination parameters. Furthermore, we propose a new fast algorithm for fitting the 3DMM in arbitrary images. Finally, we have captured the first 3D facial database with relatively unconstrained conditions and report quantitative evaluations with state-of-the-art performance. Complementary qualitative reconstruction results are demonstrated on standard "in-the-wild" facial databases. An open source implementation of our technique is released as part of the Menpo Project.