3D Face Reconstruction

Reconstructing expressive and relightable 3D head avatars from monocular videos remains challenging in computer vision, as it requires accurate modeling of both non-rigid facial motion and illumination-dependent appearance. Existing Gaussian avatar methods commonly rely on globally coupled representations, in which Gaussian primitives share a unified motion or illumination response model. Such uniform modeling neglects the distinct motion patterns and material/reflectance properties of different facial semantic regions, thereby limiting fine-grained animation accuracy and reducing relighting plausibility. To address this limitation, we propose SAMIRA, a 3D Gaussian avatar framework for semantic-adaptive motion-illumination response modeling. For motion response modeling, the Semantic-Adaptive Motion Response module rasterizes current-to-reference mesh displacements into a topology-consistent UV space and leverages facial semantics to route displacement features through semantic-specific modulators, predicting localized Gaussian geometric residuals beyond coarse mesh binding. For illumination response modeling, the Semantic-Adaptive Illumination Response module learns compact diffuse and specular response factors for each facial region, allowing Gaussians in different regions to adapt their illumination responses to novel environment lighting. These response factors are incorporated into deferred physically based shading, providing a lightweight approximation of semantic-dependent illumination effects. Extensive experiments on self-reenactment, cross-reenactment, and relighting demonstrate that SAMIRA improves both fine-grained expression reconstruction and relighting realism over existing methods.

Accurate head modeling requires a stable yet expressive geometric representation. Existing Gaussian-based head avatars commonly rely on parametric templates (e.g., FLAME) for Gaussian initialization and deformation, but these templates lack personalized priors and struggle to represent structures such as hair and clothing. To address this issue, we propose MGAvatar, a Gaussian-mesh hybrid representation that jointly models geometry and appearance through two Gaussian-mesh binding modes. Specifically, we introduce vertex-bound Gaussians and constrain their learnable parameters, enabling progressive mesh deformation to represent complex head geometry, while a pose-dependent offset module accounts for non-rigid deformations. Once geometry is stabilized, MGAvatar switches to face-bound Gaussians for appearance modeling. To improve appearance consistency across novel poses and viewpoints, we introduce a view-conditioned neural color field that alleviates artifacts caused by independently optimized Gaussian colors. In addition, we design a Gaussian offset network to predict Gaussian offset maps in the observation space, providing greater flexibility for face-bound Gaussians to capture dynamic facial textures. Extensive experiments on multi-view and monocular videos show that MGAvatar outperforms existing methods in rendering quality, producing high-fidelity head avatars with rich texture details.

Lightstage facial capture produces production-quality digital humans, but it is resource and labor-intensive. Multi-camera setups, hours of computation, and massive data storage create bottlenecks that hinder iterative workflows. This paper introduces FaceSnap, an end-to-end framework that streamlines capture via a two-stage approach. First, a one-time multi-view optimization from a range-of-motion sequence builds a personalized model encoding both geometry and expression-dependent appearance. This model then enables high-fidelity real-time facial performance capture from a single monocular lightstage camera, with no further multi-view capture required. FaceSnap jointly estimates geometry and dynamic 4K texture at 83 fps. The 4K texture is produced by a novel personalized residual upscaler that recovers subject-specific high-frequency detail, which generic upscalers fail to capture. FaceSnap achieves geometric accuracy competitive with full per-frame multi-view optimization while outperforming feed-forward methods trained on production-quality 3D data, all from a single camera view. Finally, we introduce Multi4D, a public benchmark for evaluating 4D facial reconstruction methods in lightstage environments, enabling topology-invariant geometric comparison across methods.

Recent monocular 3D face reconstruction methods achieve high fidelity by fitting a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) to dense priors predicted by networks, but the optimization stage is computationally expensive, often taking tens of seconds per image. We present RealDenseFace, a real-time optimization-based 3D face reconstruction method with dense UV-space network predictions. Our key idea is to formulate 3DMM fitting as a nonlinear least-squares problem and solve it with a tailored Gauss-Newton solver that converges in only a few iterations. The reconstruction is conducted in two stages. In the first stage, the network predicts two dense UV-space maps from a single RGB image: a correspondence map for UV-to-image alignment, and a relative-depth map for geometric constraints along the viewing direction. In the second stage, the solver fits per-vertex targets sampled from these maps at the vertex UV coordinates. The solver supports all three reconstruction settings: single-image fitting, offline sequence reconstruction, and online tracking. Our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the NeRSemble SVFR benchmark. The online tracker runs at 80+ FPS, and the offline sequence reconstruction is over 20 times faster than previous optimization-based baselines.

Articulated portrait mesh estimation is fundamental to 3D understanding, avatar generation, and immersive interaction. Existing approaches primarily rely on 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs). However, face-centric models suffer from the "floating head" assumption, conflating head pose with global rotation due to the lack of neck kinematics. Conversely, body-centric models lack high-fidelity facial expression capabilities. Furthermore, current methods struggle to disentangle jaw articulation from expression blendshapes, often over-relying on expressions for mouth opening. These limitations make monocular portrait recovery difficult across representation, supervision, and anatomical parameter estimation. To address these limitations, we introduce GRAPE(Graduated Routing for Articulated Portrait mesh Estimation). We build a Portrait Parametric Model (PPM) with an explicit torso-to-head kinematic chain and a canonical injection step to merge FLAME and the SMPL-X torso. We propose a Progressive Anatomical Alignment (PAA) network, which is composed of a pretrained portrait encoder, a Graduated-Mask Router, and coarse-to-fine experts that follow the portrait anatomical prior. We then train this network with multi-source supervision that combines sparse anatomical keypoints, feature distillation, foreground mask constraints, and relative geometry constraints. Experiments show that GRAPE improves portrait mesh recovery quality, pose alignment, and jaw--expression disentanglement over prior methods. We also demonstrate that our method can benefit the downstream tasks of audio-driven talking-head generation and 3D portrait generation.

Reconstructing dynamic human faces from brain activity provides a powerful way to study how the mind perceives identity, expression, and facial motion. However, progress in fMRI-based face decoding has been limited by scarce controlled, high-resolution neural datasets and by methods that struggle to recover both identity-specific appearance and time-varying facial dynamics. We present fMRI-Face, the first fMRI dataset paired with controllable full-HD digital human facial videos rendered at 1920$\times$1080 resolution. During scanning, participants watched photorealistic, background-free facial videos with controlled identity, expression, and head pose, while fMRI activity was recorded. The resulting dataset contains 62,856 paired fMRI-video samples, providing a structured resource for studying dynamic face perception and reconstruction. Building on this dataset, we propose fMRI2Face, a geometry-guided neural video decoding framework for reconstructing facial videos from fMRI signals. fMRI2Face derives two complementary neural controls from brain activity: Brain-derived Appearance Context, which captures global identity-related visual attributes, and Morphable 3D Facial Control, which provides explicit geometry-aware guidance for pose, expression, and non-rigid facial dynamics. These controls are integrated through Neural-Controlled Video Diffusion with auxiliary latent completion, enabling high-fidelity facial video reconstruction directly from brain activity. Experiments show that fMRI2Face consistently improves reconstruction fidelity, identity preservation, facial geometry, and motion consistency over representative neural decoding baselines. Together, fMRI-Face and fMRI2Face establish a controlled platform for studying dynamic face perception and provide a new benchmark for fMRI-based digital human reconstruction.

We propose FA-LAM, a Focus-Aware Large Avatar Model for one-shot animatable Gaussian head creation, while simultaneously enabling static 3D and dynamic 4D full-head recovery. The core of our method lies in a thorough analysis of the attention mechanisms and the entangled reconstruction and animation training pipeline adopted by prior state-of-the-art approaches. Our analysis identifies two main factors that compromise the quality of 3D full-head generation: (1) incorrect and noisy attention activations, and (2) conflicts between the tasks of reconstruction and animation. To address the first issue, we introduce a symmetric and semantic attention regularization strategy that leverages the inherent semantics and structural symmetry of human heads. To disentangle the objectives of reconstruction and animation, we develop a novel dual-phase training pipeline that separates the model's capabilities for large-view hallucination and animation into distinct modules. Moreover, we enhance our model to support multi-view and streaming 4D reconstruction in an efficient and memory-friendly manner through a core autoregressive modification with tailored visibility-aware token fusion. Collectively, these innovations enable FA-LAM to reconstruct animatable Gaussian full heads with superior quality, particularly in fine facial regions and large viewing angles.

Reconstructing high-fidelity facial geometry with an assigned topology is essential for digital avatar creation and animation, yet existing automated methods often trade off geometric fidelity and in-the-wild generalization. We present UVFaceFusion, a feed-forward framework for multi-view, fixed-topology face reconstruction from daily images. Our key idea is to replace heuristic topological optimization with learnable neural fusion in a canonical UV space. Given multi-view images, we first obtain dense point maps and facial UV correspondences of each view using VGGT and Pixel3DMM, respectively. Then, the view-specific point maps are lifted into the canonical UV domain and fused with a novel mask-aware neural fusion network. The network predicts a complete UV-space point map, from which a fixed-topology mesh is directly sampled. Although trained only on Ava-256, UVFaceFusion generalizes well to multiple public benchmarks and in-the-wild captures, benefiting from its canonical UV-space geometry-to-geometry fusion that reduces dependence on dataset-specific appearance and capture conditions. Experiments on various benchmarks show that UVFaceFusion achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction accuracy while reconstructing a mesh from 16 input views in less than 3 seconds on a single RTX 4090. Code is available at https://github.com/grignarder/UVFaceFusion.

3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) remain the standard parametric shape priors for many state-of-the-art 3D face reconstruction algorithms. However, as these models are derived from a finite number of 3D face samples, they inherit the morphological biases of their training data, potentially limiting their generalizability across diverse global populations. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to analyze 3DMM reconstructions through the lens of surface curvature, with the objective to discover, quantify and visualize biases. While standard evaluation metrics often rely on Euclidean distances, our reconstruction error captures subtle surface nuances such as local topology or undulations. To do so, we leverage the Laplace-Beltrami Operator (LBO) to generate high-resolution curvature error maps, providing a localized and geometrically meaningful visualization of discrepancies between ground truth faces and reconstructed meshes. We derive from it an error metric that we validated through a user study, observing a significantly higher correlation to human perception compared to traditional methods. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments across several 3DMM bases and fitting algorithms, uncovering systematic age-related biases and providing preliminary evidence of biases associated with gender and ethnicity. Our findings highlight the necessity of adopting curvature-aware evaluation protocols to ensure demographic fairness and geometric precision in future 3D face reconstruction research.

We present FFAvatar, a Transformer-based 3D Gaussian framework for fast construction of high-quality and animatable 4D head avatars from one or more reference portrait images. Unlike existing feed-forward approaches that require a fixed number of input views, FFAvatar supports incremental reconstruction, progressively refining the avatar representation as additional reference images become available. At the core of our method is an alternating attention mechanism that disentangles identity appearance from expression and viewpoint variations, enabling the reconstruction of a canonical 3D appearance that remains consistent across poses and facial expressions. To balance visual fidelity and computational efficiency, we introduce a sparse-to-dense learning paradigm. Coarse appearance features are first learned using sparse primitives anchored to the FLAME vertex level and are subsequently densified in the UV domain to capture fine-grained geometric and texture details. We further propose a plug-and-play motion refinement module that enables subject-specific dynamic personalization by modeling residual motion beyond parametric deformation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FFAvatar efficiently produces high-fidelity and controllable 4D head avatars, achieving superior flexibility, driving efficiency, and identity-consistent rendering across diverse expressions and viewpoints.

We present GeoFace, a geometry-constrained multi-view diffusion framework for consistent face generation from a single input. % While recent multi-view diffusion models achieve photorealistic synthesis at the per-view level, they lack an explicit mechanism to enforce a shared 3D structure across views, often leading to inconsistent geometry across viewpoints. To address this, GeoFace proposes a unified dual-stream framework for joint generation of multi-view RGB images and 3D face geometry, where the appearance and geometry streams interact through shared attention layers. To encourage the two streams to mutually constrain each other, we introduce a geometry-guided attention alignment loss that supervises the cross-attention between appearance and geometry tokens with 3D-consistent correspondences, enabling the appearance stream to correctly reference pose-invariant geometric cues for robust alignment across viewpoints. Geometry is represented as a canonical UV position map, derived from a FLAME mesh fitted to multi-view observations, serving as a view-invariant shared constraint across all generated views. Experiments on RenderMe-360 and NeRSemble demonstrate that GeoFace consistently outperforms existing methods in both visual quality and cross-view geometric consistency, facilitating more efficient 3D reconstruction.

We introduce FiCA, a Feed-forward, instant Gaussian Codec Avatar generation pipeline that creates lifelike avatars from a single portrait image. Generating a photorealistic and drivable avatar from just a single image is significantly challenging due to the limited visual information available to accurately infer the 3D appearance and geometry of human heads. To address this, we develop a novel system that combines human-centric vision foundation models with a diffusion model. This system is designed to fully exploit partial visual observations to generate lifelike human avatars. Our proposed diffusion model learns a generative mapping from these partial observations to complete and authentic 3D mesh reconstruction. Additionally, we introduce a feed-forward mesh refinement network that enhances the fidelity and identity preservation of the generated avatars, eliminating the need for person-specific test-time optimization. By leveraging a universal prior model that decodes a generated mesh into a set of 3D Gaussians, we generate a photorealistic 3D Gaussian avatar, capable of being driven with novel expressions in real-time. Our experiments demonstrate that the avatars generated by our feed-forward approach faithfully represent diverse identities and surpass the visual quality of avatars produced by recent competing methods.

We present a novel framework for realistic and controllable 3D face re-aging which produces highly detailed, identity-preserving results. Existing 3D editing methods, while effective for coarse semantic changes, are not well suited for re-aging, as even small inconsistencies across re-aged 2D views can lead to over-smoothing of subtle but perceptually important age-related details. To address this challenge, we first introduce a 2D diffusion-based re-aging model, DiffReaging, trained on synthetically generated image pairs. We further propose a center-out editing propagation strategy that leverages this re-aging model to reconstruct multi-view-consistent re-aged images. Specifically, starting from a re-aged frontal pivot view, we reconstruct the remaining views through warping and our proposed Masked-DiffReaging process. By injecting existing content at every step of the diffusion process, Masked-DiffReaging ensures that the reconstructed regions remain coherent with existing pixels. The resulting consistent set of re-aged views supervises the optimization of the re-aged 3D representation. Our method outperforms existing 3D editing techniques both visually and quantitatively, enabling smooth, fine-grained control over age transformations in 3D face models.

High-quality 4D head avatars from one or a few source portraits are central to telepresence, AR/VR, and digital-human interaction. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as the dominant representation, with two complementary regimes (generalizable feed-forward predictors and per-subject refiners) maturing in parallel. However, existing feed-forward predictors are trained on a single dataset family with a hard-coded source count, inheriting the corresponding domain bias. Per-subject refiners require 300K--600K iterations and rely on adaptive densification that destroys upstream Gaussian layouts, preventing the two regimes from sharing a representation end-to-end. To bridge both regimes we propose SpatialAvatar-0 on a shared FLAME-mesh-bound Gaussian representation: a feed-forward generator with a parameter-free K-source mean-pool and a monocular-temporal to multi-view-spatial two-phase schedule that anchors against identity-prior collapse onto the smaller multi-view set. We further introduce a 10K-iter layout-preserving per-subject refinement loop that freezes the FLAME-binding and Gaussian count and replaces densification with a three-component anti-spike regularization. On VFHQ/HDTF cross-domain zero-shot we surpass the in-domain leader GAGAvatar by +1.5 dB PSNR despite never training on either test domain, and on the SplattingAvatar monocular benchmark we lead every reported metric, surpassing the 300K-iter GeoAvatar by +1.3 dB PSNR at up to 60x shorter per-subject schedule than common SOTA baselines. Website: https://spatialwalk.github.io/SpatialAvatar-0.

Real-time stereoscopic video communication has long been a goal of immersive telepresence, yet practical systems still require specialized capture rigs or reduce remote users to a single portrait view. We present LentiAvatar, a Gaussian head-avatar system that connects monocular avatar capture with subpixel-encoded glasses-free lenticular display for real-time autostereoscopic communication. From a monocular portrait video, LentiAvatar reconstructs a controllable head avatar and optimizes it for the lateral viewing zones induced by the display. The method uses natural head turns as pseudo-multiview (PMV) supervision to constrain regions that are otherwise weakly observed in monocular training, including hair, ears, jaw contours, and neck boundaries. Reliable side frames are yaw-binned, aligned to virtual cameras, and supervised within a strict head-and-hair domain; contour-aware losses and staged regularization further suppress ghosting, alpha leakage, and depth instability while preserving lateral detail. At runtime, LentiAvatar renders 32 virtual views and encodes them into a 4K lenticular raster with calibrated subpixel-routing masks. The live-tracker prototype sustains 10.65 FPS, and a subject-specific distilled driver raises the same display pipeline to 38.49 FPS.

Facial hair is a defining trait of personal identity, yet remains a critical bottleneck for digital avatars. Recent volumetric methods achieve photorealism but bake hair into the underlying face geometry, preventing editability and failing to resolve sparse, strand-like structures. Meanwhile, scalp-hair reconstruction methods target dense hair volumes and do not transfer to the sparse, spatially-varying nature of facial hair. We present a pipeline that automatically reconstructs facial hair -- beard, mustache, lashes, and brows -- from multi-view images, converting an unstructured 3D Gaussian representation into an explicit curve-based strand representation. We resolve geometric ambiguities in four stages: (i) optimizing 3D Gaussians constrained by tracked head geometry to enforce early ray termination and suppress sub-surface noise; (ii) tracing continuous strands robust to frequent crossings and extreme curvature; (iii) grounding strands to the surface and resolving root-tip ambiguity via a physically-motivated prior; and (iv) refining the reconstruction through opacity-driven density control under photometric optimization. To our knowledge, this is the first method to reconstruct high-fidelity facial hair strands from a 3D Gaussian representation. The recovered strands faithfully preserve the orientation and sparsity patterns characteristic of facial hair, and yield assets immediately suitable for downstream production tasks, including facial animation and physical simulation, geometric grooming and transfer, appearance editing, and physics-based rendering.

Modeling dynamic facial expressions using 3D Gaussian representations remains challenging due to their unstructured nature. Conventional Gaussian avatar pipelines require extensive multiview and sequential expression data, limiting scalability and accessibility. In this work, we introduce Self-Adaptive Gaussian Expression (SAGE), a framework for self-learning expression-induced Gaussian deformations that enables high-fidelity, animatable avatars from minimal input data. Our method jointly optimizes 2D Gaussian surfels and a Signed Distance Field (SDF) to enforce compact, surface-aligned Gaussian distributions, while a self-supervised expression learning phase replaces long training sequences with geometric and appearance consistency constraints. This design allows flexible deployment across multiple reconstruction regimes: in the multiview setting, only a single frame (timestep) is required instead of thousands; in the monocular setting, only head rotations are needed without expression sequences; and in the one-shot setting, no pretraining or priors are necessary. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves reconstruction and animation quality comparable to state-of-the-art methods, while reducing data requirements by several orders of magnitude. Our results highlight the potential of self-supervised Gaussian deformation learning as a step toward accessible, data-efficient avatar creation.

Reconstructing a photorealistic 3D face avatar from a single unconstrained photograph is challenging: feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models degrade on out-of-distribution inputs, while pretrained diffusion models produce high-fidelity images but lack multi-view consistency. We observe that these paradigms are fundamentally complementary: explicit 3D representations guarantee geometric consistency, whereas 2D diffusion priors ensure photorealism. Building on this, we propose SplatShot, a training-free framework that couples these representations directly within the denoising process. Given a base 3DGS face model and a single reference image, we jointly denoise all target views using a per-step 3D feedback loop. At each timestep, we predict clean images from the noisy latents, refit the 3DGS to these multi-view predictions, and back-propagate the photometric discrepancy between the 3DGS re-renderings and 2D predictions into the noise estimate. This steers the sampling trajectory toward strictly 3D-coherent, identity-faithful outputs. Experiments on diverse in-the-wild images demonstrate that SplatShot produces 3D avatars with superior identity preservation, photorealism, and multi-view consistency.

We present SHELLS (Semantic Head Estimation via Layered Local Sampling), an efficient feed-forward framework for 3D head reconstruction in dense semantic correspondence from multi-view images. Existing methods typically refine vertices independently via localized feature volumes. This approach couples memory-intensive feature sampling to mesh resolution, which limits scalability for dense topologies (> 10k vertices) and introduces surface noise. In contrast, SHELLS decouples feature extraction from mesh resolution via a hierarchical sampling strategy. We extract multi-view features using a DINOv2 backbone with LoRA adaptation, projectively sample a sparse global feature cloud, and predict an intermediate coarse mesh. This coarse prior guides the construction of layered, surface-aware sampling shells that serve as a discrete search space for the final reconstruction. SHELLS maintains surface consistency while using 88% less inference GPU memory (2.4GB vs. 20GB) than volumetric baselines. It reduces median registration error by 21% to 29% with a 3.5x inference speedup (0.08s vs. 0.29s) for 18k-vertex meshes. Notably, our model is trained exclusively on synthetic data yet generalizes effectively to real-world captures, eliminating the need for the costly, pre-registered multi-view datasets common in prior work.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provides an efficient method for high-quality scene reconstruction using anisotropic Gaussians. Recently, 3DGS-based methods have significantly improved the rendering quality of human avatars while enabling real-time performance. However, existing methods suffer from a magnitude mismatch in the number of Gaussians generated by image-based and 3DMM-based approaches. This discrepancy results in reconstructed expressions that lack fine-grained detail. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for reconstructing an animatable head avatar from a single image. We propose a Graph splitting network to progressively generate Gaussians from coarse to fine using an autoregressive architecture. To address the graph inconsistency caused by split Gaussians, we employ a mesh topology extension method to align the GNN's connectivity with the increased Gaussian count. Furthermore, we introduce a novel density control method that includes a gating mechanism that generates soft masks for Gaussians, preventing over-densification after the splitting operation. This allows for dynamic control over Gaussian density across different facial regions. For smooth and rapid training, we employ a delayed filtering strategy to avoid re-computing the graph topology during training. Experimental results demonstrate that our autoregressive structure effectively improves expression representation ability by progressively splitting Gaussians. This process, enabled by the GNN-guided splitting, synthesizes more precise facial details and achieves higher reconstruction quality.

Generating 3D models from face sketches is an active topic of research in Computer Graphics due to its potential to tremendously facilitate the modeling of faces for both professional 3D arists and novices. Motivated by the observation that facial expressions are responsible for significantly altering and shaping the contours in our faces, we combine both expression detection and 3D model generation in our approach. The result is a novel approach to generating 3D models from sketches which relies on three components: Convolutional Neural Networks, a parametric 3D face model (Valley Girl), and Active Snake Contours. For the first time in the literature, CNNs are trained (using our own generated dataset) to detect the expression in the given sketch through detecting the active FACS Action Units. The expression is then duplicated on Valley Girl to obtain a 3D model with a similar expression. Active Snake Contours are then used to find the transforms needed to close the gaps between that model and the given sketch.

High-fidelity 3D Gaussian head avatar generation is critical for applications such as AR/VR, telepresence, and digital humans. Existing methods depend on multi-view datasets, 3D captures, or intermediate 2D view synthesis. In contrast, we learn both conditional and unconditional 3D head models from randomly sampled 2D images alone, without using multi-view data, 3D supervision, or intermediate view generation. We introduce MVCHead, a single-shot state space model that enforces multi-view consistency (MVC) directly in the 3D representation while regressing 3D Gaussians under these constraints. At its core, we propose a Hierarchical State Space (HiSS) block that progressively refines Gaussians from coarse to fine, while capturing long-range dependencies. Within each HiSS block, we modify Mamba's standard unidirectional scan with the proposed Hierarchical Bi-directional State Scan (HiBiSS) that aligns recurrence with the axes along which multi-view inconsistencies are strongest. Finally, we design an SE(3) Multi-view Critic that judges whether a set of self-renders arises from a single underlying 3D configuration, rewarding cross-view pixel alignment without observing real multi-view pairs. MVCHead achieves state-of-the-art perceptual quality, surpasses prior methods in both texture and geometric consistency, and maintains comparable shape consistency. To demonstrate scalability, we release FaceGS-10K, the first large-scale dataset of ready-to-use 3D Gaussian head assets for training and evaluation of 3D head models. Project Page and code: https://humansensinglab.github.io/MVCHead/

Avatar reconstruction has traditionally relied on per-subject optimization that requires hours of computation or on expensive preprocessing that limits scalability. We introduce FFAvatar, a generalizable feed-forward framework that reconstructs high-quality, animatable 3D Gaussian head avatars from few-shot unposed portrait images in seconds. FFAvatar fuses information from multiple source images into a unified canonical Gaussian representation through Multi-View Query-Former, which is animated via FLAME parameters predicted end-to-end directly from pixels, eliminating the overhead of offline FLAME extraction. We further propose a three-stage training curriculum that achieves both broad generalization and high-fidelity reconstruction: (i) scalable pretraining on extensive monocular video data with over 1M identities to learn strong generalizable priors; (ii) multi-view fine-tuning on a small but high-quality dataset of 360-degree captures to enhance geometric fidelity and extreme-view awareness; and (iii) optional personalization that adapts to specific identities for maximum fidelity within 500 optimization steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FFAvatar sets a new standard for identity preservation, geometric consistency, and animation fidelity. On the NeRSemble benchmark, it outperforms the state-of-the-art LAM by a substantial 5.5 PSNR gain. Furthermore, FFAvatar enables real-time deployment, reconstructing avatars in 2 seconds without personalization and 10 seconds with personalization, while supporting 49 FPS animation on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU.

High-quality, real-time talking head synthesis remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Existing reconstruction- and rendering-based methods typically rely on identity-specific models, limiting cross-identity generalization. To address this issue, we propose SDTalk, a one-shot 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based framework that generalizes to unseen identities without personalized training or fine-tuning. Our framework comprises two modules with a two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, we incorporate structured facial priors into the reconstruction module and separately predict 3DGS parameters for visible and occluded regions, enabling complete head reconstruction from a single image. In the second stage, we introduce a dual-branch motion field to model coarse and fine facial dynamics, improving detail fidelity and lip synchronization. Experiments demonstrate that SDTalk surpasses existing methods in both visual quality and inference efficiency.

High-quality facial appearance capture has traditionally required costly studio recording. Recent works consider an in-the-wild smartphone-based setup; however, their model-based inverse rendering paradigm struggles with the complex disentanglement of reflectance from unknown illumination. To bridge this gap, we propose to shift the paradigm into training a powerful delighting network as a prior to constrain the optimization. We leverage the OLAT dataset and the rendered Light Stage scans for training, and propose Dataset Latent Modulation (DLM) to seamlessly integrate these heterogeneous data sources. Specifically, by conditioning the core network on learnable source-aware tokens, we decouple dataset-specific styles from physical delighting principles, enabling the emergence of a delighting prior that outperforms existing proprietary models. This powerful delighting prior enables a simple and automatic appearance capture pipeline that achieves high-quality reflectance estimation from casual video inputs, outperforming prior arts by a large margin. Furthermore, we leverage our appearance capture method to transform the multi-view NeRSemble dataset into NeRSemble-Scan, a large-scale collection of 4K-resolution relightable scans. By open-sourcing our model and the NeRSemble-Scan dataset, we democratize high-end facial capture and provide a new foundation for the research community to build photorealistic digital humans.

We present a single-image head mesh reconstruction framework that addresses the longstanding challenge of simultaneously preserving facial identity and producing industry-grade topology. Our framework adopts a coarse-to-fine optimization pipeline that refines a rigged template across three stages -- rig, joint, and vertex -- achieving stable convergence and consistent topology. To mitigate the ill-posed nature of single-image 3D face reconstruction and ensure identity preservation, we employ a normal consistency objective jointly with landmark alignment. To further preserve local surface structure and enforce topological regularity, we introduce geometry-aware constraints based on Gaussian curvature and conformal consistency, along with auxiliary regularizations that correct fine artifacts such as lip seams and eyelid discontinuities. Our hierarchical optimization with geometry-aware regularization yields meshes with semantically meaningful edge flow and industry-grade topology. After geometry reconstruction, we extract UV-space texture and normal maps to preserve appearance details for visualization and downstream use. In a user study with 22 professional technical artists, our results were assessed as approaching industry-grade usability, and 95% of participants ranked our method as the top-performing approach, underscoring its effectiveness for real-world digital human production.

We propose HeadsUp, a scalable feed-forward method for reconstructing high-quality 3D Gaussian heads from large-scale multi-camera setups. Our method employs an efficient encoder-decoder architecture that compresses input views into a compact latent representation. This latent representation is then decoded into a set of UV-parameterized 3D Gaussians anchored to a neutral head template. This UV representation decouples the number of 3D Gaussians from the number and resolution of input images, enabling training with many high-resolution input views. We train and evaluate our model on an internal dataset with more than 10,000 subjects, which is an order of magnitude larger than existing multi-view human head datasets. HeadsUp achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and generalizes to novel identities without test-time optimization. We extensively analyze the scaling behavior of our model across identities, views, and model capacity, revealing practical insights for quality-compute trade-offs. Finally, we highlight the strength of our latent space by showcasing two downstream applications: generating novel 3D identities and animating the 3D heads with expression blendshapes.

Nowadays as convolution neural networks demonstrate its powerful problem-solving ability in the area of image processing, efforts have been made to reconstruct detailed face shapes from 2D face images or videos. However, to make the full use of CNN, a large number of labeled data is required to train the network. Coarse morphable face model has been used to synthesize labeled data. However, it is hard for coarse morphable face models to generate photo-realistic data with detail such as wrinkles. In this project, we present a pipeline that reconstructs a human face 3D model from a single RGB image. The pipeline includes face detection, landmark detection, regression of 3DMM model parameters, and soft rendering. Mentor: Zhipeng Fan (Email: [email protected]) Code Repository: https://github.com/SeVEnMY/3d-face- reconstruction Code Reference: https://github.com/sicxu/Deep3DFaceRecon pytorch

Single-image 3D face reconstruction is a core problem in computer vision, with important clinical applications such as cephalometric landmark analysis in orthodontics. Traditionally, this analysis relies on lateral X-ray imaging; however, frequent X-ray exposure is impractical due to radiation concerns. While recent research has explored detecting landmarks from lateral RGB images as an alternative, existing methods typically rely on 2D features such as the eyes, mouth, ears, and boundary silhouettes, failing to fully exploit the underlying 3D facial geometry spanning the facial profile and jawline, which is essential for accurate diagnosis. Meanwhile, although 3D face reconstruction from frontal views has seen significant progress, most learning-based 3D morphable model (3DMM) regressors are developed and benchmarked on near-frontal images, where appearance cues are abundant. In extreme profile views (yaw $\approx 90^\circ$), much of the face is occluded, and the available signal is dominated by boundary cues, making accurate 3D reconstruction challenging. In this paper, we bridge this gap with geometry-conditioned synthetic data and a simple profile-specific FLAME regression baseline for single lateral images. We introduce ProfileSynth, a dataset created by sampling FLAME shape and pose parameters in extreme yaw ranges and generating photorealistic profile images using a diffusion model conditioned on depth and normal maps. We further study a profile-specific baseline with visibility-aware jawline regularization. Our framework provides a practical baseline for "profile $\times$ 3DMM" reconstruction and a promising foundation for more accurate, non-invasive cephalometric analysis from lateral RGB images.

Recent frameworks like ToFu and TEMPEH provide an automated alternative to classical registration pipelines by predicting 3D meshes in dense semantic correspondence directly from calibrated multi-view images. However, these learning-based methods rely on the slow, manual registration pipelines they aim to replace for their training supervision. We overcome this limitation with MOCHI (Multi-view Optimizable Correspondence of Heads from Images), a multi-view 3D face prediction framework trained without requiring registered training data. MOCHI eliminates the registration data dependency by enforcing topological consistency through a pseudo-linear inverse kinematic solver. Semantic alignment is guided by dense keypoints from a 2D landmark predictor trained exclusively on synthetic data. Our analysis further reveals that standard point-to-surface distances induce training instabilities and visual artifacts in registration-free settings. We propose pointmap- and normal-based losses instead, which provide smoother gradients and superior reconstruction fidelity. Finally, we introduce a test-time optimization scheme that refines network weights over a few dozen iterations. This approach bridges the gap between feed-forward efficiency and iterative optimization precision, allowing MOCHI to outperform traditional labor-intensive pipelines in both reconstruction accuracy and visual quality. Code and model are public at: https://filby89.github.io/mochi.