43-Issue 2
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Browsing 43-Issue 2 by Author "Beeler, Thabo"
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Item GANtlitz: Ultra High Resolution Generative Model for Multi-Modal Face Textures(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2024) Gruber, Aurel; Collins, Edo; Meka, Abhimitra; Mueller, Franziska; Sarkar, Kripasindhu; Orts-Escolano, Sergio; Prasso, Luca; Busch, Jay; Gross, Markus; Beeler, Thabo; Bermano, Amit H.; Kalogerakis, EvangelosHigh-resolution texture maps are essential to render photoreal digital humans for visual effects or to generate data for machine learning. The acquisition of high resolution assets at scale is cumbersome, it involves enrolling a large number of human subjects, using expensive multi-view camera setups, and significant manual artistic effort to align the textures. To alleviate these problems, we introduce GANtlitz (A play on the german noun Antlitz, meaning face), a generative model that can synthesize multi-modal ultra-high-resolution face appearance maps for novel identities. Our method solves three distinct challenges: 1) unavailability of a very large data corpus generally required for training generative models, 2) memory and computational limitations of training a GAN at ultra-high resolutions, and 3) consistency of appearance features such as skin color, pores and wrinkles in high-resolution textures across different modalities. We introduce dual-style blocks, an extension to the style blocks of the StyleGAN2 architecture, which improve multi-modal synthesis. Our patch-based architecture is trained only on image patches obtained from a small set of face textures (<100) and yet allows us to generate seamless appearance maps of novel identities at 6k×4k resolution. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations and baseline comparisons show the efficacy of our proposed system.Item Learning to Stabilize Faces(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2024) Bednarik, Jan; Wood, Erroll; Choutas, Vassilis; Bolkart, Timo; Wang, Daoye; Wu, Chenglei; Beeler, Thabo; Bermano, Amit H.; Kalogerakis, EvangelosNowadays, it is possible to scan faces and automatically register them with high quality. However, the resulting face meshes often need further processing: we need to stabilize them to remove unwanted head movement. Stabilization is important for tasks like game development or movie making which require facial expressions to be cleanly separated from rigid head motion. Since manual stabilization is labor-intensive, there have been attempts to automate it. However, previous methods remain impractical: they either still require some manual input, produce imprecise alignments, rely on dubious heuristics and slow optimization, or assume a temporally ordered input. Instead, we present a new learning-based approach that is simple and fully automatic. We treat stabilization as a regression problem: given two face meshes, our network directly predicts the rigid transform between them that brings their skulls into alignment. We generate synthetic training data using a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM), exploiting the fact that 3DMM parameters separate skull motion from facial skin motion. Through extensive experiments we show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art both quantitatively and qualitatively on the tasks of stabilizing discrete sets of facial expressions as well as dynamic facial performances. Furthermore, we provide an ablation study detailing the design choices and best practices to help others adopt our approach for their own uses.Item ShellNeRF: Learning a Controllable High-resolution Model of the Eye and Periocular Region(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2024) Li, Gengyan; Sarkar, Kripasindhu; Meka, Abhimitra; Buehler, Marcel; Mueller, Franziska; Gotardo, Paulo; Hilliges, Otmar; Beeler, Thabo; Bermano, Amit H.; Kalogerakis, EvangelosEye gaze and expressions are crucial non-verbal signals in face-to-face communication. Visual effects and telepresence demand significant improvements in personalized tracking, animation, and synthesis of the eye region to achieve true immersion. Morphable face models, in combination with coordinate-based neural volumetric representations, show promise in solving the difficult problem of reconstructing intricate geometry (eyelashes) and synthesizing photorealistic appearance variations (wrinkles and specularities) of eye performances. We propose a novel hybrid representation - ShellNeRF - that builds a discretized volume around a 3DMM face mesh using concentric surfaces to model the deformable 'periocular' region. We define a canonical space using the UV layout of the shells that constrains the space of dense correspondence search. Combined with an explicit eyeball mesh for modeling corneal light-transport, our model allows for animatable photorealistic 3D synthesis of the whole eye region. Using multi-view video input, we demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art in expression re-enactment and transfer for high-resolution close-up views of the eye region.