ICface: Interpretable and Controllable Face Reenactment Using GANs

Soumya Tripathy, Juho Kannala, Esa Rahtu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2020, pp. 3385-3394

This paper presents a generic face animator that can control the pose and expressions of a given face image. The animation is driven by human interpretable control signals consisting of head pose angles and the Action Unit (AU) values. The control information can be obtained from multiple sources including external driving videos and manual controls. Due to the interpretable nature of the driving signal, one can easily mix the information between multiple sources (e.g. pose from one image and expression from another) and apply selective post- production editing. The proposed face animator is implemented as a two-stage neural network model that is learned in a self-supervised manner using a large video collection. The proposed Interpretable and Controllable face reenactment network (ICface) is compared to the state-of-the-art neural network-based face animation techniques in multiple tasks. The results indicate that ICface produces better visual quality while being more versatile than most of the comparison methods. The introduced model could provide a lightweight and easy to use tool for a multitude of advanced image and video editing tasks. The program code will be publicly available upon the acceptance of the paper.