Neural Implicit Morphing of Face Images

Guilherme Schardong, Tiago Novello, Hallison Paz, Iurii Medvedev, Vinícius da Silva, Luiz Velho, Nuno Gonçalves; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 7321-7330

Face morphing is a problem in computer graphics with numerous artistic and forensic applications. It is challenging due to variations in pose lighting gender and ethnicity. This task consists of a warping for feature alignment and a blending for a seamless transition between the warped images. We propose to leverage coord-based neural networks to represent such warpings and blendings of face images. During training we exploit the smoothness and flexibility of such networks by combining energy functionals employed in classical approaches without discretizations. Additionally our method is time-dependent allowing a continuous warping/blending of the images. During morphing inference we need both direct and inverse transformations of the time-dependent warping. The first (second) is responsible for warping the target (source) image into the source (target) image. Our neural warping stores those maps in a single network dismissing the need for inverting them. The results of our experiments indicate that our method is competitive with both classical and generative models under the lens of image quality and face-morphing detectors. Aesthetically the resulting images present a seamless blending of diverse faces not yet usual in the literature.