Unsupervised Facial Performance Editing via Vector-Quantized StyleGAN Representations

Berkay Kicanaoglu, Pablo Garrido, Gaurav Bharaj; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 2371-2382

High-fidelity virtual human avatar applications create a need for photorealistic video face synthesis with controllable semantic editing over facial features. While recent generative neural methods have shown significant progress in portrait video synthesis, intuitive facial control, e.g., of mouth interior and gaze at different levels of details, remains a challenge. In this work, we present a novel face editing framework that combines a 3D face model with StyleGAN vector-quantization to learn multi-level semantic facial control. We show that vector quantization of StyleGAN features unveils richer semantic facial representations, e.g., teeth and pupils, which are difficult to model with 3D tracking priors. Such representations along with 3D tracking can be used as self-supervision to train a generator with control over coarse expressions and finer facial attributes. Learned representations can be combined with user-defined masks to create semantic segmentations that act as custom detail handles for semantic-aware video editing. Our formulation allows video face manipulation with precise local control over facial attributes, such as eyes and teeth, opening up a number of face reenactment and visual expression articulation applications.