FSRT: Facial Scene Representation Transformer for Face Reenactment from Factorized Appearance Head-pose and Facial Expression Features

Andre Rochow, Max Schwarz, Sven Behnke; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 7716-7726

The task of face reenactment is to transfer the head motion and facial expressions from a driving video to the appearance of a source image which may be of a different person (cross-reenactment). Most existing methods are CNN-based and estimate optical flow from the source image to the current driving frame which is then inpainted and refined to produce the output animation. We propose a transformer-based encoder for computing a set-latent representation of the source image(s). We then predict the output color of a query pixel using a transformer-based decoder which is conditioned with keypoints and a facial expression vector extracted from the driving frame. Latent representations of the source person are learned in a self-supervised manner that factorize their appearance head pose and facial expressions. Thus they are perfectly suited for cross-reenactment. In contrast to most related work our method naturally extends to multiple source images and can thus adapt to person-specific facial dynamics. We also propose data augmentation and regularization schemes that are necessary to prevent overfitting and support generalizability of the learned representations. We evaluated our approach in a randomized user study. The results indicate superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art in terms of motion transfer quality and temporal consistency.