We address the problem of recovering the 3D geometry of a human face from a set of facial images in multiple views. While recent studies have shown impressive progress in 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) based facial reconstruction, the settings are mostly restricted to a single view. There is an inherent drawback in the single-view setting: the lack of reliable 3D constraints can cause unresolvable ambiguities. We in this paper explore 3DMM-based shape recovery in a different setting, where a set of multi-view facial images are given as input. A novel approach is proposed to regress 3DMM parameters from multi-view inputs with an end-to-end trainable Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Multiview geometric constraints are incorporated into the network by establishing dense correspondences between different views leveraging a novel self-supervised view alignment loss. The main ingredient of the view alignment loss is a differentiable dense optical flow estimator that can backpropagate the alignment errors between an input view and a synthetic rendering from another input view, which is projected to the target view through the 3D shape to be inferred. Through minimizing the view alignment loss, better 3D shapes can be recovered such that the synthetic projections from one view to another can better align with the observed image. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over other 3DMM methods.
@cite_35: We present FaceWarehouse, a database of 3D facial expressions for visual computing applications. We use Kinect, an off-the-shelf RGBD camera, to capture 150 individuals aged 7-80 from various ethnic backgrounds. For each person, we captured the RGBD data of her different expressions, including the neutral expression and 19 other expressions such as mouth-opening, smile, kiss, etc. For every RGBD raw data record, a set of facial feature points on the color image such as eye corners, mouth contour, and the nose tip are automatically localized, and manually adjusted if better accuracy is required. We then deform a template facial mesh to fit the depth data as closely as possible while matching the feature points on the color image to their corresponding points on the mesh. Starting from these fitted face meshes, we construct a set of individual-specific expression blendshapes for each person. These meshes with consistent topology are assembled as a rank-3 tensor to build a bilinear face model with two attributes: identity and expression. Compared with previous 3D facial databases, for every person in our database, there is a much richer matching collection of expressions, enabling depiction of most human facial actions. We demonstrate the potential of FaceWarehouse for visual computing with four applications: facial image manipulation, face component transfer, real-time performance-based facial image animation, and facial animation retargeting from video to image.
@cite_6: We present a data-driven inference method that can synthesize a photorealistic texture map of a complete 3D face model given a partial 2D view of a person in the wild. After an initial estimation of shape and low-frequency albedo, we compute a high-frequency partial texture map, without the shading component, of the visible face area. To extract the fine appearance details from this incomplete input, we introduce a multi-scale detail analysis technique based on mid-layer feature correlations extracted from a deep convolutional neural network. We demonstrate that fitting a convex combination of feature correlations from a high-resolution face database can yield a semantically plausible facial detail description of the entire face. A complete and photorealistic texture map can then be synthesized by iteratively optimizing for the reconstructed feature correlations. Using these high-resolution textures and a commercial rendering framework, we can produce high-fidelity 3D renderings that are visually comparable to those obtained with state-of-the-art multi-view face capture systems. We demonstrate successful face reconstructions from a wide range of low resolution input images, including those of historical figures. In addition to extensive evaluations, we validate the realism of our results using a crowdsourced user study.
@cite_20: In this paper, a new technique for modeling textured 3D faces is introduced. 3D faces can either be generated automatically from one or more photographs, or modeled directly through an intuitive user interface. Users are assisted in two key problems of computer aided face modeling. First, new face images or new 3D face models can be registered automatically by computing dense one-to-one correspondence to an internal face model. Second, the approach regulates the naturalness of modeled faces avoiding faces with an “unlikely” appearance. Starting from an example set of 3D face models, we derive a morphable face model by transforming the shape and texture of the examples into a vector space representation. New faces and expressions can be modeled by forming linear combinations of the prototypes. Shape and texture constraints derived from the statistics of our example faces are used to guide manual modeling or automated matching algorithms. We show 3D face reconstructions from single images and their applications for photo-realistic image manipulations. We also demonstrate face manipulations according to complex parameters such as gender, fullness of a face or its distinctiveness.
Blanz and Vetter @cite_20 introduced the 3D morphable model to represent textured 3D faces using linear combinations of a set of shape and texture bases, which is derived from collections of real 3D face scans. The model is later extended to include facial expressions by FaceWarehouse @cite_35 . In this paper, we focus on recovering the underlying 3D shapes of human faces, hence we are only interested in regressing 3DMM parameters for shapes and expressions. We argue that more realistic textures for 3D meshes can be obtained with more advanced texture synthesis techniques @cite_6 instead of the 3DMM texture representations.