CartoonAlive: Towards Expressive Live2D Modeling from Single Portraits

With the rapid advancement of large foundation models, AIGC, cloud rendering, and real-time motion capture technologies, digital humans are now capable of achieving synchronized facial expressions and body movements, engaging in intelligent dialogues driven by natural language, and enabling the fast creation of personalized avatars. While current mainstream approaches to digital humans primarily focus on 3D models and 2D video-based representations, interactive 2D cartoon-style digital humans have received relatively less attention. Compared to 3D digital humans that require complex modeling and high rendering costs, and 2D video-based solutions that lack flexibility and real-time interactivity, 2D cartoon-style Live2D models offer a more efficient and expressive alternative. By simulating 3D-like motion through layered segmentation without the need for traditional 3D modeling, Live2D enables dynamic and real-time manipulation. In this technical report, we present CartoonAlive, an innovative method for generating high-quality Live2D digital humans from a single input portrait image. CartoonAlive leverages the shape basis concept commonly used in 3D face modeling to construct facial blendshapes suitable for Live2D. It then infers the corresponding blendshape weights based on facial keypoints detected from the input image. This approach allows for the rapid generation of a highly expressive and visually accurate Live2D model that closely resembles the input portrait, within less than half a minute. Our work provides a practical and scalable solution for creating interactive 2D cartoon characters, opening new possibilities in digital content creation and virtual character animation. The project homepage is https://human3daigc.github.io/CartoonAlive_webpage/.

Speak2Sign3D: A Multi-modal Pipeline for English Speech to American Sign Language Animation

Helping deaf and hard-of-hearing people communicate more easily is the main goal of Automatic Sign Language Translation. Although most past research has focused on turning sign language into text, doing the reverse, turning spoken English into sign language animations, has been largely overlooked. That's because it involves multiple steps, such as understanding speech, translating it into sign-friendly grammar, and generating natural human motion. In this work, we introduce a complete pipeline that converts English speech into smooth, realistic 3D sign language animations. Our system starts with Whisper to translate spoken English into text. Then, we use a MarianMT machine translation model to translate that text into American Sign Language (ASL) gloss, a simplified version of sign language that captures meaning without grammar. This model performs well, reaching BLEU scores of 0.7714 and 0.8923. To make the gloss translation more accurate, we also use word embeddings such as Word2Vec and FastText to understand word meanings. Finally, we animate the translated gloss using a 3D keypoint-based motion system trained on Sign3D-WLASL, a dataset we created by extracting body, hand, and face key points from real ASL videos in the WLASL dataset. To support the gloss translation stage, we also built a new dataset called BookGlossCorpus-CG, which turns everyday English sentences from the BookCorpus dataset into ASL gloss using grammar rules. Our system stitches everything together by smoothly interpolating between signs to create natural, continuous animations. Unlike previous works like How2Sign and Phoenix-2014T that focus on recognition or use only one type of data, our pipeline brings together audio, text, and motion in a single framework that goes all the way from spoken English to lifelike 3D sign language animation.

GenHSI: Controllable Generation of Human-Scene Interaction Videos

Large-scale pre-trained video diffusion models have exhibited remarkable capabilities in diverse video generation. However, existing solutions face several challenges in using these models to generate long movie-like videos with rich human-object interactions that include unrealistic human-scene interaction, lack of subject identity preservation, and require expensive training. We propose GenHSI, a training-free method for controllable generation of long human-scene interaction videos (HSI). Taking inspiration from movie animation, our key insight is to overcome the limitations of previous work by subdividing the long video generation task into three stages: (1) script writing, (2) pre-visualization, and (3) animation. Given an image of a scene, a user description, and multiple images of a person, we use these three stages to generate long-videos that preserve human-identity and provide rich human-scene interactions. Script writing converts complex human tasks into simple atomic tasks that are used in the pre-visualization stage to generate 3D keyframes (storyboards). These 3D keyframes are rendered and animated by off-the-shelf video diffusion models for consistent long video generation with rich contacts in a 3D-aware manner. A key advantage of our work is that we alleviate the need for scanned, accurate scenes and create 3D keyframes from single-view images. We are the first to generate a long video sequence with a consistent camera pose that contains arbitrary numbers of character actions without training. Experiments demonstrate that our method can generate long videos that effectively preserve scene content and character identity with plausible human-scene interaction from a single image scene. Visit our project homepage https://kunkun0w0.github.io/project/GenHSI/ for more information.

BecomingLit: Relightable Gaussian Avatars with Hybrid Neural Shading

We introduce BecomingLit, a novel method for reconstructing relightable, high-resolution head avatars that can be rendered from novel viewpoints at interactive rates. Therefore, we propose a new low-cost light stage capture setup, tailored specifically towards capturing faces. Using this setup, we collect a novel dataset consisting of diverse multi-view sequences of numerous subjects under varying illumination conditions and facial expressions. By leveraging our new dataset, we introduce a new relightable avatar representation based on 3D Gaussian primitives that we animate with a parametric head model and an expression-dependent dynamics module. We propose a new hybrid neural shading approach, combining a neural diffuse BRDF with an analytical specular term. Our method reconstructs disentangled materials from our dynamic light stage recordings and enables all-frequency relighting of our avatars with both point lights and environment maps. In addition, our avatars can easily be animated and controlled from monocular videos. We validate our approach in extensive experiments on our dataset, where we consistently outperform existing state-of-the-art methods in relighting and reenactment by a significant margin.

Bias-Switchable Row-Column Array Imaging using Fast Orthogonal Row-Column Electronic Scanning (FORCES) Compared with Conventional Row-Column Array Imaging

Row-Column Arrays (RCAs) offer an attractive alternative to fully wired 2D-arrays for 3D-ultrasound, due to their greatly simplified wiring. However, conventional RCAs face challenges related to their long elements. These include an inability to image beyond the shadow of the aperture and an inability to focus in both transmit and receive for desired scan planes. To address these limitations, we recently developed bias-switchable RCAs, also known as Top Orthogonal to Bottom Electrode (TOBE) arrays. These arrays provide novel opportunities to read out from every element of the array and achieve high-quality images. While TOBE arrays and their associated imaging schemes have shown promise, they have not yet been directly compared experimentally to conventional RCA imaging techniques. This study aims to provide such a comparison, demonstrating superior B-scan and volumetric images from two electrostrictive relaxor TOBE arrays, using a method called Fast Orthogonal Row-Column Electronic scanning (FORCES), compared to conventional RCA imaging schemes, including Tilted Plane Wave (TPW) compounding and Virtual Line Source (VLS) imaging. The study quantifies resolution and Generalized Contrast to Noise Ratio (gCNR) in phantoms, and also demonstrates volumetric acquisitions in phantom and animal models.

Pose Splatter: A 3D Gaussian Splatting Model for Quantifying Animal Pose and Appearance

Accurate and scalable quantification of animal pose and appearance is crucial for studying behavior. Current 3D pose estimation techniques, such as keypoint- and mesh-based techniques, often face challenges including limited representational detail, labor-intensive annotation requirements, and expensive per-frame optimization. These limitations hinder the study of subtle movements and can make large-scale analyses impractical. We propose Pose Splatter, a novel framework leveraging shape carving and 3D Gaussian splatting to model the complete pose and appearance of laboratory animals without prior knowledge of animal geometry, per-frame optimization, or manual annotations. We also propose a novel rotation-invariant visual embedding technique for encoding pose and appearance, designed to be a plug-in replacement for 3D keypoint data in downstream behavioral analyses. Experiments on datasets of mice, rats, and zebra finches show Pose Splatter learns accurate 3D animal geometries. Notably, Pose Splatter represents subtle variations in pose, provides better low-dimensional pose embeddings over state-of-the-art as evaluated by humans, and generalizes to unseen data. By eliminating annotation and per-frame optimization bottlenecks, Pose Splatter enables analysis of large-scale, longitudinal behavior needed to map genotype, neural activity, and micro-behavior at unprecedented resolution.

ToonifyGB: StyleGAN-based Gaussian Blendshapes for 3D Stylized Head Avatars

The introduction of 3D Gaussian blendshapes has enabled the real-time reconstruction of animatable head avatars from monocular video. Toonify, a StyleGAN-based framework, has become widely used for facial image stylization. To extend Toonify for synthesizing diverse stylized 3D head avatars using Gaussian blendshapes, we propose an efficient two-stage framework, ToonifyGB. In Stage 1 (stylized video generation), we employ an improved StyleGAN to generate the stylized video from the input video frames, which addresses the limitation of cropping aligned faces at a fixed resolution as preprocessing for normal StyleGAN. This process provides a more stable video, which enables Gaussian blendshapes to better capture the high-frequency details of the video frames, and efficiently generate high-quality animation in the next stage. In Stage 2 (Gaussian blendshapes synthesis), we learn a stylized neutral head model and a set of expression blendshapes from the generated video. By combining the neutral head model with expression blendshapes, ToonifyGB can efficiently render stylized avatars with arbitrary expressions. We validate the effectiveness of ToonifyGB on the benchmark dataset using two styles: Arcane and Pixar.

SVAD: From Single Image to 3D Avatar via Synthetic Data Generation with Video Diffusion and Data Augmentation

Creating high-quality animatable 3D human avatars from a single image remains a significant challenge in computer vision due to the inherent difficulty of reconstructing complete 3D information from a single viewpoint. Current approaches face a clear limitation: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods produce high-quality results but require multiple views or video sequences, while video diffusion models can generate animations from single images but struggle with consistency and identity preservation. We present SVAD, a novel approach that addresses these limitations by leveraging complementary strengths of existing techniques. Our method generates synthetic training data through video diffusion, enhances it with identity preservation and image restoration modules, and utilizes this refined data to train 3DGS avatars. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that SVAD outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) single-image methods in maintaining identity consistency and fine details across novel poses and viewpoints, while enabling real-time rendering capabilities. Through our data augmentation pipeline, we overcome the dependency on dense monocular or multi-view training data typically required by traditional 3DGS approaches. Extensive quantitative, qualitative comparisons show our method achieves superior performance across multiple metrics against baseline models. By effectively combining the generative power of diffusion models with both the high-quality results and rendering efficiency of 3DGS, our work establishes a new approach for high-fidelity avatar generation from a single image input.

Real-Time Animatable 2DGS-Avatars with Detail Enhancement from Monocular Videos

High-quality, animatable 3D human avatar reconstruction from monocular videos offers significant potential for reducing reliance on complex hardware, making it highly practical for applications in game development, augmented reality, and social media. However, existing methods still face substantial challenges in capturing fine geometric details and maintaining animation stability, particularly under dynamic or complex poses. To address these issues, we propose a novel real-time framework for animatable human avatar reconstruction based on 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS). By leveraging 2DGS and global SMPL pose parameters, our framework not only aligns positional and rotational discrepancies but also enables robust and natural pose-driven animation of the reconstructed avatars. Furthermore, we introduce a Rotation Compensation Network (RCN) that learns rotation residuals by integrating local geometric features with global pose parameters. This network significantly improves the handling of non-rigid deformations and ensures smooth, artifact-free pose transitions during animation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method successfully reconstructs realistic and highly animatable human avatars from monocular videos, effectively preserving fine-grained details while ensuring stable and natural pose variation. Our approach surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in both reconstruction quality and animation robustness on public benchmarks.

MagicPortrait: Temporally Consistent Face Reenactment with 3D Geometric Guidance

In this paper, we propose a method for video face reenactment that integrates a 3D face parametric model into a latent diffusion framework, aiming to improve shape consistency and motion control in existing video-based face generation approaches. Our approach employs the FLAME (Faces Learned with an Articulated Model and Expressions) model as the 3D face parametric representation, providing a unified framework for modeling face expressions and head pose. This enables precise extraction of detailed face geometry and motion features from driving videos. Specifically, we enhance the latent diffusion model with rich 3D expression and detailed pose information by incorporating depth maps, normal maps, and rendering maps derived from FLAME sequences. A multi-layer face movements fusion module with integrated self-attention mechanisms is used to combine identity and motion latent features within the spatial domain. By utilizing the 3D face parametric model as motion guidance, our method enables parametric alignment of face identity between the reference image and the motion captured from the driving video. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our method excels at generating high-quality face animations with precise expression and head pose variation modeling. In addition, it demonstrates strong generalization performance on out-of-domain images. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/weimengting/MagicPortrait.