Paper ID: 2309.16859

Preface: A Data-driven Volumetric Prior for Few-shot Ultra High-resolution Face Synthesis

Marcel C. Bühler, Kripasindhu Sarkar, Tanmay Shah, Gengyan Li, Daoye Wang, Leonhard Helminger, Sergio Orts-Escolano, Dmitry Lagun, Otmar Hilliges, Thabo Beeler, Abhimitra Meka

NeRFs have enabled highly realistic synthesis of human faces including complex appearance and reflectance effects of hair and skin. These methods typically require a large number of multi-view input images, making the process hardware intensive and cumbersome, limiting applicability to unconstrained settings. We propose a novel volumetric human face prior that enables the synthesis of ultra high-resolution novel views of subjects that are not part of the prior's training distribution. This prior model consists of an identity-conditioned NeRF, trained on a dataset of low-resolution multi-view images of diverse humans with known camera calibration. A simple sparse landmark-based 3D alignment of the training dataset allows our model to learn a smooth latent space of geometry and appearance despite a limited number of training identities. A high-quality volumetric representation of a novel subject can be obtained by model fitting to 2 or 3 camera views of arbitrary resolution. Importantly, our method requires as few as two views of casually captured images as input at inference time.

Submitted: Sep 28, 2023