Marek Kowalski

Stephan J. Garbin, Marek Kowalski, Virginia Estellers et al.

The recent increase in popularity of volumetric representations for scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis has put renewed focus on animating volumetric content at high visual quality and in real-time. While implicit deformation methods based on learned functions can produce impressive results, they are `black boxes' to artists and content creators, they require large amounts of training data to generalise meaningfully, and they do not produce realistic extrapolations outside the training data. In this work we solve these issues by introducing a volume deformation method which is real-time, easy to edit with off-the-shelf software and can extrapolate convincingly. To demonstrate the versatility of our method, we apply it in two scenarios: physics-based object deformation and telepresence where avatars are controlled using blendshapes. We also perform thorough experiments showing that our method compares favourably to both volumetric approaches combined with implicit deformation and methods based on mesh deformation.

Joanna Kaleta, Kacper Kania, Tomasz Trzcinski et al.

Decoupling lighting from geometry using unconstrained photo collections is notoriously challenging. Solving it would benefit many users as creating complex 3D assets takes days of manual labor. Many previous works have attempted to address this issue, often at the expense of output fidelity, which questions the practicality of such methods. We introduce LumiGauss - a technique that tackles 3D reconstruction of scenes and environmental lighting through 2D Gaussian Splatting. Our approach yields high-quality scene reconstructions and enables realistic lighting synthesis under novel environment maps. We also propose a method for enhancing the quality of shadows, common in outdoor scenes, by exploiting spherical harmonics properties. Our approach facilitates seamless integration with game engines and enables the use of fast precomputed radiance transfer. We validate our method on the NeRF-OSR dataset, demonstrating superior performance over baseline methods. Moreover, LumiGauss can synthesize realistic images for unseen environment maps. Our code: https://github.com/joaxkal/lumigauss.

Joanna Kaleta, Piotr Wójcik, Kacper Marzol et al.

In 3D reconstruction, the problem of inverse rendering, namely recovering the illumination of the scene and the material properties, is fundamental. Existing Gaussian Splatting-based methods primarily target static scenes and often assume simplified or moderate lighting to avoid entangling shadows with surface appearance. This limits their ability to accurately separate lighting effects from material properties, particularly in real-world conditions. We address this limitation by leveraging dynamic elements - regions of the scene that undergo motion - as a supervisory signal for inverse rendering. Motion reveals the same surfaces under varying lighting conditions, providing stronger cues for disentangling material and illumination. This thesis is supported by our experimental results which show we improve LPIPS by 23% for albedo estimation and by 15% for scene relighting relative to next-best baseline. To this end, we introduce LumiMotion, the first Gaussian-based approach that leverages dynamics for inverse rendering and operates in arbitrary dynamic scenes. Our method learns a dynamic 2D Gaussian Splatting representation that employs a set of novel constraints which encourage the dynamic regions of the scene to deform, while keeping static regions stable. As we demonstrate, this separation is crucial for correct optimization of the albedo. Finally, we release a new synthetic benchmark comprising five scenes under four lighting conditions, each in both static and dynamic variants, for the first time enabling systematic evaluation of inverse rendering methods in dynamic environments and challenging lighting. Link to project page: https://joaxkal.github.io/LumiMotion/

Joanna Kaleta, Bartosz Świrta, Kacper Kania et al.

The growing demand for rapid and scalable 3D asset creation has driven interest in feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods, with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) emerging as an effective scene representation. While recent approaches have demonstrated pose-free reconstruction from unposed image collections, integrating stylization or appearance control into such pipelines remains underexplored. Existing attempts largely rely on image-based conditioning, which limits both controllability and flexibility. In this work, we introduce AnyStyle, a feed-forward 3D reconstruction and stylization framework that enables pose-free, zero-shot stylization through multimodal conditioning. Our method supports both textual and visual style inputs, allowing users to control the scene appearance using natural language descriptions or reference images. We propose a modular stylization architecture that requires only minimal architectural modifications and can be integrated into existing feed-forward 3D reconstruction backbones. Experiments demonstrate that AnyStyle improves style controllability over prior feed-forward stylization methods while preserving high-quality geometric reconstruction. A user study further confirms that AnyStyle achieves superior stylization quality compared to an existing state-of-the-art approach. Repository: https://github.com/joaxkal/AnyStyle.

Marek Kowalski, Zbigniew Nasarzewski, Grzegorz Galinski et al.

We present HoloFace, an open-source framework for face alignment, head pose estimation and facial attribute retrieval for Microsoft HoloLens. HoloFace implements two state-of-the-art face alignment methods which can be used interchangeably: one running locally and one running on a remote backend. Head pose estimation is accomplished by fitting a deformable 3D model to the landmarks localized using face alignment. The head pose provides both the rotation of the head and a position in the world space. The parameters of the fitted 3D face model provide estimates of facial attributes such as mouth opening or smile. Together the above information can be used to augment the faces of people seen by the HoloLens user, and thus their interaction. Potential usage scenarios include facial recognition, emotion recognition, eye gaze tracking and many others. We demonstrate the capabilities of our framework by augmenting the faces of people seen through the HoloLens with various objects and animations.

Jack Saunders, Charlie Hewitt, Yanan Jian et al.

Gaussian Splatting has changed the game for real-time photo-realistic rendering. One of the most popular applications of Gaussian Splatting is to create animatable avatars, known as Gaussian Avatars. Recent works have pushed the boundaries of quality and rendering efficiency but suffer from two main limitations. Either they require expensive multi-camera rigs to produce avatars with free-view rendering, or they can be trained with a single camera but only rendered at high quality from this fixed viewpoint. An ideal model would be trained using a short monocular video or image from available hardware, such as a webcam, and rendered from any view. To this end, we propose GASP: Gaussian Avatars with Synthetic Priors. To overcome the limitations of existing datasets, we exploit the pixel-perfect nature of synthetic data to train a Gaussian Avatar prior. By fitting this prior model to a single photo or video and fine-tuning it, we get a high-quality Gaussian Avatar, which supports 360$^\circ$ rendering. Our prior is only required for fitting, not inference, enabling real-time application. Through our method, we obtain high-quality, animatable Avatars from limited data which can be animated and rendered at 70fps on commercial hardware. See our project page (https://microsoft.github.io/GASP/) for results.

Martin de La Gorce, Charlie Hewitt, Tibor Takacs et al.

Virtual 3D meetings offer the potential to enhance copresence, increase engagement and thus improve effectiveness of remote meetings compared to standard 2D video calls. However, representing people in 3D meetings remains a challenge; existing solutions achieve high quality by using complex hardware, making use of fixed appearance via enrolment, or by inverting a pre-trained generative model. These approaches lead to constraints that are unwelcome and ill-fitting for videoconferencing applications. We present the first method to predict 3D Gaussian reconstructions in real time from a single 2D webcam feed, where the 3D representation is not only live and realistic, but also authentic to the input video. By conditioning the 3D representation on each video frame independently, our reconstruction faithfully recreates the input video from the captured viewpoint (a property we call authenticity), while generalizing realistically to novel viewpoints. Additionally, we introduce a stability loss to obtain reconstructions that are temporally stable on video sequences. We show that our method delivers state-of-the-art accuracy in visual quality and stability metrics compared to existing methods, and demonstrate our approach in live one-to-one 3D meetings using only a standard 2D camera and display. This demonstrates that our approach can allow anyone to communicate volumetrically, via a method for 3D videoconferencing that is not only highly accessible, but also realistic and authentic.

Kacper Kania, Stephan J. Garbin, Andrea Tagliasacchi et al.

Generating faithful visualizations of human faces requires capturing both coarse and fine-level details of the face geometry and appearance. Existing methods are either data-driven, requiring an extensive corpus of data not publicly accessible to the research community, or fail to capture fine details because they rely on geometric face models that cannot represent fine-grained details in texture with a mesh discretization and linear deformation designed to model only a coarse face geometry. We introduce a method that bridges this gap by drawing inspiration from traditional computer graphics techniques. Unseen expressions are modeled by blending appearance from a sparse set of extreme poses. This blending is performed by measuring local volumetric changes in those expressions and locally reproducing their appearance whenever a similar expression is performed at test time. We show that our method generalizes to unseen expressions, adding fine-grained effects on top of smooth volumetric deformations of a face, and demonstrate how it generalizes beyond faces.

Kacper Kania, Kwang Moo Yi, Marek Kowalski et al.

We extend neural 3D representations to allow for intuitive and interpretable user control beyond novel view rendering (i.e. camera control). We allow the user to annotate which part of the scene one wishes to control with just a small number of mask annotations in the training images. Our key idea is to treat the attributes as latent variables that are regressed by the neural network given the scene encoding. This leads to a few-shot learning framework, where attributes are discovered automatically by the framework, when annotations are not provided. We apply our method to various scenes with different types of controllable attributes (e.g. expression control on human faces, or state control in movement of inanimate objects). Overall, we demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time novel view and novel attribute re-rendering of scenes from a single video.

Kacper Kania, Marek Kowalski, Tomasz Trzciński

The creation of plausible and controllable 3D human motion animations is a long-standing problem that requires a manual intervention of skilled artists. Current machine learning approaches can semi-automate the process, however, they are limited in a significant way: they can handle only a single trajectory of the expected motion that precludes fine-grained control over the output. To mitigate that issue, we reformulate the problem of future pose prediction into pose completion in space and time where multiple trajectories are represented as poses with missing joints. We show that such a framework can generalize to other neural networks designed for future pose prediction. Once trained in this framework, a model is capable of predicting sequences from any number of trajectories. We propose a novel transformer-like architecture, TrajeVAE, that builds on this idea and provides a versatile framework for 3D human animation. We demonstrate that TrajeVAE offers better accuracy than the trajectory-based reference approaches and methods that base their predictions on past poses. We also show that it can predict reasonable future poses even if provided only with an initial pose.

Stephan J. Garbin, Marek Kowalski, Matthew Johnson et al.

Recent work on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) showed how neural networks can be used to encode complex 3D environments that can be rendered photorealistically from novel viewpoints. Rendering these images is very computationally demanding and recent improvements are still a long way from enabling interactive rates, even on high-end hardware. Motivated by scenarios on mobile and mixed reality devices, we propose FastNeRF, the first NeRF-based system capable of rendering high fidelity photorealistic images at 200Hz on a high-end consumer GPU. The core of our method is a graphics-inspired factorization that allows for (i) compactly caching a deep radiance map at each position in space, (ii) efficiently querying that map using ray directions to estimate the pixel values in the rendered image. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method is 3000 times faster than the original NeRF algorithm and at least an order of magnitude faster than existing work on accelerating NeRF, while maintaining visual quality and extensibility.

Tadas Baltrusaitis, Erroll Wood, Virginia Estellers et al.

Analysis of faces is one of the core applications of computer vision, with tasks ranging from landmark alignment, head pose estimation, expression recognition, and face recognition among others. However, building reliable methods requires time-consuming data collection and often even more time-consuming manual annotation, which can be unreliable. In our work we propose synthesizing such facial data, including ground truth annotations that would be almost impossible to acquire through manual annotation at the consistency and scale possible through use of synthetic data. We use a parametric face model together with hand crafted assets which enable us to generate training data with unprecedented quality and diversity (varying shape, texture, expression, pose, lighting, and hair).

Stephan J. Garbin, Marek Kowalski, Matthew Johnson et al.

Generating photorealistic images of human faces at scale remains a prohibitively difficult task using computer graphics approaches. This is because these require the simulation of light to be photorealistic, which in turn requires physically accurate modelling of geometry, materials, and light sources, for both the head and the surrounding scene. Non-photorealistic renders however are increasingly easy to produce. In contrast to computer graphics approaches, generative models learned from more readily available 2D image data have been shown to produce samples of human faces that are hard to distinguish from real data. The process of learning usually corresponds to a loss of control over the shape and appearance of the generated images. For instance, even simple disentangling tasks such as modifying the hair independently of the face, which is trivial to accomplish in a computer graphics approach, remains an open research question. In this work, we propose an algorithm that matches a non-photorealistic, synthetically generated image to a latent vector of a pretrained StyleGAN2 model which, in turn, maps the vector to a photorealistic image of a person of the same pose, expression, hair, and lighting. In contrast to most previous work, we require no synthetic training data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm of its kind to work at a resolution of 1K and represents a significant leap forward in visual realism.

Marek Kowalski, Stephan J. Garbin, Virginia Estellers et al.

Our ability to sample realistic natural images, particularly faces, has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years, yet our ability to exert fine-tuned control over the generative process has lagged behind. If this new technology is to find practical uses, we need to achieve a level of control over generative networks which, without sacrificing realism, is on par with that seen in computer graphics and character animation. To this end we propose ConfigNet, a neural face model that allows for controlling individual aspects of output images in semantically meaningful ways and that is a significant step on the path towards finely-controllable neural rendering. ConfigNet is trained on real face images as well as synthetic face renders. Our novel method uses synthetic data to factorize the latent space into elements that correspond to the inputs of a traditional rendering pipeline, separating aspects such as head pose, facial expression, hair style, illumination, and many others which are very hard to annotate in real data. The real images, which are presented to the network without labels, extend the variety of the generated images and encourage realism. Finally, we propose an evaluation criterion using an attribute detection network combined with a user study and demonstrate state-of-the-art individual control over attributes in the output images.

Marek Kowalski, Jacek Naruniec

In this work we present a face alignment pipeline based on two novel methods: weighted splitting for K-cluster Regression Forests and 3D Affine Pose Regression for face shape initialization. Our face alignment method is based on the Local Binary Feature framework, where instead of standard regression forests and pixel difference features used in the original method, we use our K-cluster Regression Forests with Weighted Splitting (KRFWS) and Pyramid HOG features. We also use KRFWS to perform Affine Pose Regression (APR) and 3D-Affine Pose Regression (3D-APR), which intend to improve the face shape initialization. APR applies a rigid 2D transform to the initial face shape that compensates for inaccuracy in the initial face location, size and in-plane rotation. 3D-APR estimates the parameters of a 3D transform that additionally compensates for out-of-plane rotation. The resulting pipeline, consisting of APR and 3D-APR followed by face alignment, shows an improvement of 20% over standard LBF on the challenging IBUG dataset, and state-of-theart accuracy on the entire 300-W dataset.

Marek Kowalski, Jacek Naruniec, Tomasz Trzcinski

In this paper, we propose Deep Alignment Network (DAN), a robust face alignment method based on a deep neural network architecture. DAN consists of multiple stages, where each stage improves the locations of the facial landmarks estimated by the previous stage. Our method uses entire face images at all stages, contrary to the recently proposed face alignment methods that rely on local patches. This is possible thanks to the use of landmark heatmaps which provide visual information about landmark locations estimated at the previous stages of the algorithm. The use of entire face images rather than patches allows DAN to handle face images with large variation in head pose and difficult initializations. An extensive evaluation on two publicly available datasets shows that DAN reduces the state-of-the-art failure rate by up to 70%. Our method has also been submitted for evaluation as part of the Menpo challenge.