Super: Selfie Undistortion and Head Pose Editing with Identity Preservation

Recent attempts to solve the problem of head reenactment using a single reference image have shown promising results. However, most of them either perform poorly in terms of photo-realism, or fail to meet the identity preservation problem, or do not fully transfer the driving pose and expression. We propose HeadGAN, a novel system that conditions synthesis on 3D face representations, which can be extracted from any driving video and adapted to the facial geometry of any reference image, disentangling identity from expression. We further improve mouth movements, by utilising audio features as a complementary input. The 3D face representation enables HeadGAN to be further used as an efficient method for compression and reconstruction and a tool for expression and pose editing.

Face rotation provides an effective and cheap way for data augmentation and representation learning of face recognition. It is a challenging generative learning problem due to the large pose discrepancy between two face images. This work focuses on flexible face rotation of arbitrary head poses, including extreme profile views. We propose a novel Couple-Agent Pose-Guided Generative Adversarial Network (CAPG-GAN) to generate both neutral and profile head pose face images. The head pose information is encoded by facial landmark heatmaps. It not only forms a mask image to guide the generator in learning process but also provides a flexible controllable condition during inference. A couple-agent discriminator is introduced to reinforce on the realism of synthetic arbitrary view faces. Besides the generator and conditional adversarial loss, CAPG-GAN further employs identity preserving loss and total variation regularization to preserve identity information and refine local textures respectively. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results on the Multi-PIE and LFW databases consistently show the superiority of our face rotation method over the state-of-the-art.

Achieving high synchronization in the synthesis of realistic, speech-driven talking head videos presents a significant challenge. A lifelike talking head requires synchronized coordination of subject identity, lip movements, facial expressions, and head poses. The absence of these synchronizations is a fundamental flaw, leading to unrealistic results. To address the critical issue of synchronization, identified as the "devil" in creating realistic talking heads, we introduce SyncTalk++, which features a Dynamic Portrait Renderer with Gaussian Splatting to ensure consistent subject identity preservation and a Face-Sync Controller that aligns lip movements with speech while innovatively using a 3D facial blendshape model to reconstruct accurate facial expressions. To ensure natural head movements, we propose a Head-Sync Stabilizer, which optimizes head poses for greater stability. Additionally, SyncTalk++ enhances robustness to out-of-distribution (OOD) audio by incorporating an Expression Generator and a Torso Restorer, which generate speech-matched facial expressions and seamless torso regions. Our approach maintains consistency and continuity in visual details across frames and significantly improves rendering speed and quality, achieving up to 101 frames per second. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that SyncTalk++ outperforms state-of-the-art methods in synchronization and realism.

Abstract3D-controllable portrait synthesis has significantly advanced, thanks to breakthroughs in generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, it is still challenging to manipulate existing face images with precise 3D control. While concatenating GAN inversion and a 3D-aware, noise-to-image GAN is a straight-forward solution, it is inefficient and may lead to noticeable drop in editing quality. To fill this gap, we propose 3D-FM GAN, a novel conditional GAN framework designed specifically for 3D-controllable Face Manipulation, and does not require any tuning after the end-to-end learning phase. By carefully encoding both the input face image and a physically-based rendering of 3D edits into a StyleGAN’s latent spaces, our image generator provides high-quality, identity-preserved, 3D-controllable face manipulation. To effectively learn such novel framework, we develop two essential training strategies and a novel multiplicative co-modulation architecture that improves significantly upon naive schemes. With extensive evaluations, we show that our method outperforms the prior arts on various tasks, with better editability, stronger identity preservation, and higher photo-realism. In addition, we demonstrate a better generalizability of our design on large pose editing and out-of-domain images.

Editing of portrait images is a very popular and important research topic with a large variety of applications. For ease of use, control should be provided via a semantically meaningful parameterization that is akin to computer animation controls. The vast majority of existing techniques do not provide such intuitive and fine-grained control, or only enable coarse editing of a single isolated control parameter. Very recently, high-quality semantically controlled editing has been demonstrated, however only on synthetically created StyleGAN images. We present the first approach for embedding real portrait images in the latent space of StyleGAN, which allows for intuitive editing of the head pose, facial expression, and scene illumination in the image. Semantic editing in parameter space is achieved based on StyleRig, a pretrained neural network that maps the control space of a 3D morphable face model to the latent space of the GAN. We design a novel hierarchical non-linear optimization problem to obtain the embedding. An identity preservation energy term allows spatially coherent edits while maintaining facial integrity. Our approach runs at interactive frame rates and thus allows the user to explore the space of possible edits. We evaluate our approach on a wide set of portrait photos, compare it to the current state of the art, and validate the effectiveness of its components in an ablation study.