{Face2Face}: {R}eal-time Face Capture and Reenactment of {RGB} Videos

We present Face2Face, a novel approach for real-time facial reenactment of a monocular target video sequence (e.g., Youtube video). The source sequence is also a monocular video stream, captured live with a commodity webcam. Our goal is to animate the facial expressions of the target video by a source actor and re-render the manipulated output video in a photo-realistic fashion. To this end, we first address the under-constrained problem of facial identity recovery from monocular video by non-rigid model-based bundling. At run time, we track facial expressions of both source and target video using a dense photometric consistency measure. Reenactment is then achieved by fast and efficient deformation transfer between source and target. The mouth interior that best matches the re-targeted expression is retrieved from the target sequence and warped to produce an accurate fit. Finally, we convincingly re-render the synthesized target face on top of the corresponding video stream such that it seamlessly blends with the real-world illumination. We demonstrate our method in a live setup, where Youtube videos are reenacted in real time

HeadOn: Real-time Reenactment of Human Portrait Videos

We propose HeadOn, the first real-time source-to-target reenactment approach for complete human portrait videos that enables transfer of torso and head motion, face expression, and eye gaze. Given a short RGB-D video of the target actor, we automatically construct a personalized geometry proxy that embeds a parametric head, eye, and kinematic torso model. A novel real-time reenactment algorithm employs this proxy to photo-realistically map the captured motion from the source actor to the target actor. On top of the coarse geometric proxy, we propose a video-based rendering technique that composites the modified target portrait video via view- and pose-dependent texturing, and creates photo-realistic imagery of the target actor under novel torso and head poses, facial expressions, and gaze directions. To this end, we propose a robust tracking of the face and torso of the source actor. We extensively evaluate our approach and show significant improvements in enabling much greater flexibility in creating realistic reenacted output videos.Comment: Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dg49wv2c_g Presented at Siggraph'1

EgoFace: Egocentric Face Performance Capture and Videorealistic Reenactment

Face performance capture and reenactment techniques use multiple cameras and sensors, positioned at a distance from the face or mounted on heavy wearable devices. This limits their applications in mobile and outdoor environments. We present EgoFace, a radically new lightweight setup for face performance capture and front-view videorealistic reenactment using a single egocentric RGB camera. Our lightweight setup allows operations in uncontrolled environments, and lends itself to telepresence applications such as video-conferencing from dynamic environments. The input image is projected into a low dimensional latent space of the facial expression parameters. Through careful adversarial training of the parameter-space synthetic rendering, a videorealistic animation is produced. Our problem is challenging as the human visual system is sensitive to the smallest face irregularities that could occur in the final results. This sensitivity is even stronger for video results. Our solution is trained in a pre-processing stage, through a supervised manner without manual annotations. EgoFace captures a wide variety of facial expressions, including mouth movements and asymmetrical expressions. It works under varying illuminations, background, movements, handles people from different ethnicities and can operate in real time

ICface: Interpretable and Controllable Face Reenactment Using GANs

This paper presents a generic face animator that is able to 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.Comment: Accepted in WACV-202

2D-to-3D facial expression transfer

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Automatically changing the expression and physical features of a face from an input image is a topic that has been traditionally tackled in a 2D domain. In this paper, we bring this problem to 3D and propose a framework that given an input RGB video of a human face under a neutral expression, initially computes his/her 3D shape and then performs a transfer to a new and potentially non-observed expression. For this purpose, we parameterize the rest shape --obtained from standard factorization approaches over the input video-- using a triangular mesh which is further clustered into larger macro-segments. The expression transfer problem is then posed as a direct mapping between this shape and a source shape, such as the blend shapes of an off-the-shelf 3D dataset of human facial expressions. The mapping is resolved to be geometrically consistent between 3D models by requiring points in specific regions to map on semantic equivalent regions. We validate the approach on several synthetic and real examples of input faces that largely differ from the source shapes, yielding very realistic expression transfers even in cases with topology changes, such as a synthetic video sequence of a single-eyed cyclops.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft