Towards Realistic Generative 3D Face Models

Aashish Rai, Hiresh Gupta, Ayush Pandey, Francisco Vicente Carrasco, Shingo Jason Takagi, Amaury Aubel, Daeil Kim, Aayush Prakash, Fernando De la Torre; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024, pp. 3738-3748

In recent years, there has been significant progress in 2D generative face models fueled by applications such as animation, synthetic data generation, and digital avatars. However, due to the absence of 3D information, these 2D models often struggle to accurately disentangle facial attributes like pose, expression, and illumination, limiting their editing capabilities. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a 3D controllable generative face model to produce high-quality albedo and precise 3D shapes by leveraging existing 2D generative models. By combining 2D face generative models with semantic face manipulation, this method enables editing of detailed 3D rendered faces. The proposed framework utilizes an alternating descent optimization approach over shape and albedo. Differentiable rendering is used to train high-quality shapes and albedo without 3D supervision. Moreover, this approach outperforms most state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in the well-known NoW and REALY benchmarks for 3D face reconstruction. It also outperforms the SOTA reconstruction models in recovering rendered faces' identities across novel poses. Additionally, the paper demonstrates direct control of expressions in 3D faces by exploiting latent space leading to text-based editing of 3D faces.