Title: End-to-end 3D face reconstruction with deep neural networks,
Abstract: Monocular 3D facial shape reconstruction from a single 2D facial image has
been an active research area due to its wide applications. Inspired by the
success of deep neural networks (DNN), we propose a DNN-based approach for
End-to-End 3D FAce Reconstruction (UH-E2FAR) from a single 2D image. Different
from recent works that reconstruct and refine the 3D face in an iterative
manner using both an RGB image and an initial 3D facial shape rendering, our
DNN model is end-to-end, and thus the complicated 3D rendering process can be
avoided. Moreover, we integrate in the DNN architecture two components, namely
a multi-task loss function and a fusion convolutional neural network (CNN) to
improve facial expression reconstruction. With the multi-task loss function, 3D
face reconstruction is divided into neutral 3D facial shape reconstruction and
expressive 3D facial shape reconstruction. The neutral 3D facial shape is
class-specific. Therefore, higher layer features are useful. In comparison, the
expressive 3D facial shape favors lower or intermediate layer features. With
the fusion-CNN, features from different intermediate layers are fused and
transformed for predicting the 3D expressive facial shape. Through extensive
experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of our end-to-end framework in
improving the accuracy of 3D face reconstruction.