ImFace: A Nonlinear 3D Morphable Face Model With Implicit Neural Representations

Mingwu Zheng, Hongyu Yang, Di Huang, Liming Chen; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 20343-20352

Precise representations of 3D faces are beneficial to various computer vision and graphics applications. Due to the data discretization and model linearity however, it remains challenging to capture accurate identity and expression clues in current studies. This paper presents a novel 3D morphable face model, namely ImFace, to learn a nonlinear and continuous space with implicit neural representations. It builds two explicitly disentangled deformation fields to model complex shapes associated with identities and expressions, respectively, and designs an improved learning strategy to extend embeddings of expressions to allow more diverse changes. We further introduce a Neural Blend-Field to learn sophisticated details by adaptively blending a series of local fields. In addition to ImFace, an effective preprocessing pipeline is proposed to address the issue of watertight input requirement in implicit representations, enabling them to work with common facial surfaces for the first time. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the superiority of ImFace.