Boyao Zhou

Zhe Li, Zerong Zheng, Yuxiao Liu et al.

Creating pose-driven human avatars is about modeling the mapping from the low-frequency driving pose to high-frequency dynamic human appearances, so an effective pose encoding method that can encode high-fidelity human details is essential to human avatar modeling. To this end, we present PoseVocab, a novel pose encoding method that encourages the network to discover the optimal pose embeddings for learning the dynamic human appearance. Given multi-view RGB videos of a character, PoseVocab constructs key poses and latent embeddings based on the training poses. To achieve pose generalization and temporal consistency, we sample key rotations in $so(3)$ of each joint rather than the global pose vectors, and assign a pose embedding to each sampled key rotation. These joint-structured pose embeddings not only encode the dynamic appearances under different key poses, but also factorize the global pose embedding into joint-structured ones to better learn the appearance variation related to the motion of each joint. To improve the representation ability of the pose embedding while maintaining memory efficiency, we introduce feature lines, a compact yet effective 3D representation, to model more fine-grained details of human appearances. Furthermore, given a query pose and a spatial position, a hierarchical query strategy is introduced to interpolate pose embeddings and acquire the conditional pose feature for dynamic human synthesis. Overall, PoseVocab effectively encodes the dynamic details of human appearance and enables realistic and generalized animation under novel poses. Experiments show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines both qualitatively and quantitatively in terms of synthesis quality. Code is available at https://github.com/lizhe00/PoseVocab.

Siyou Lin, Boyao Zhou, Zerong Zheng et al.

We address the problem of aligning real-world 3D data of garments, which benefits many applications such as texture learning, physical parameter estimation, generative modeling of garments, etc. Existing extrinsic methods typically perform non-rigid iterative closest point and struggle to align details due to incorrect closest matches and rigidity constraints. While intrinsic methods based on functional maps can produce high-quality correspondences, they work under isometric assumptions and become unreliable for garment deformations which are highly non-isometric. To achieve wrinkle-level as well as texture-level alignment, we present a novel coarse-to-fine two-stage method that leverages intrinsic manifold properties with two neural deformation fields, in the 3D space and the intrinsic space, respectively. The coarse stage performs a 3D fitting, where we leverage intrinsic manifold properties to define a manifold deformation field. The coarse fitting then induces a functional map that produces an alignment of intrinsic embeddings. We further refine the intrinsic alignment with a second neural deformation field for higher accuracy. We evaluate our method with our captured garment dataset, GarmCap. The method achieves accurate wrinkle-level and texture-level alignment and works for difficult garment types such as long coats. Our project page is https://jsnln.github.io/iccv2023_intrinsic/index.html.

Hongyu Liu, Xuan Wang, Yating Wang et al.

We introduce AvatarPointillist, a novel framework for generating dynamic 4D Gaussian avatars from a single portrait image. At the core of our method is a decoder-only Transformer that autoregressively generates a point cloud for 3D Gaussian Splatting. This sequential approach allows for precise, adaptive construction, dynamically adjusting point density and the total number of points based on the subject's complexity. During point generation, the AR model also jointly predicts per-point binding information, enabling realistic animation. After generation, a dedicated Gaussian decoder converts the points into complete, renderable Gaussian attributes. We demonstrate that conditioning the decoder on the latent features from the AR generator enables effective interaction between stages and markedly improves fidelity. Extensive experiments validate that AvatarPointillist produces high-quality, photorealistic, and controllable avatars. We believe this autoregressive formulation represents a new paradigm for avatar generation, and we will release our code inspire future research.

Zijian Wu, Boyao Zhou, Liangxiao Hu et al.

We present UIKA, a feed-forward animatable Gaussian head model from an arbitrary number of unposed inputs, including a single image, multi-view captures, and smartphone-captured videos. Unlike the traditional avatar method, which requires a studio-level multi-view capture system and reconstructs a human-specific model through a long-time optimization process, we rethink the task through the lenses of model representation, network design, and data preparation. First, we introduce a UV-guided avatar modeling strategy, in which each input image is associated with a pixel-wise facial correspondence estimation. Such correspondence estimation allows us to reproject each valid pixel color from screen space to UV space, which is independent of camera pose and character expression. Furthermore, we design learnable UV tokens on which the attention mechanism can be applied at both the screen and UV levels. The learned UV tokens can be decoded into canonical Gaussian attributes using aggregated UV information from all input views. To train our large avatar model, we additionally prepare a large-scale, identity-rich synthetic training dataset. Our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in both monocular and multi-view settings. Project page: https://zijian-wu.github.io/uika-page/

Liangxiao Hu, Hongwen Zhang, Yuxiang Zhang et al.

We present GaussianAvatar, an efficient approach to creating realistic human avatars with dynamic 3D appearances from a single video. We start by introducing animatable 3D Gaussians to explicitly represent humans in various poses and clothing styles. Such an explicit and animatable representation can fuse 3D appearances more efficiently and consistently from 2D observations. Our representation is further augmented with dynamic properties to support pose-dependent appearance modeling, where a dynamic appearance network along with an optimizable feature tensor is designed to learn the motion-to-appearance mapping. Moreover, by leveraging the differentiable motion condition, our method enables a joint optimization of motions and appearances during avatar modeling, which helps to tackle the long-standing issue of inaccurate motion estimation in monocular settings. The efficacy of GaussianAvatar is validated on both the public dataset and our collected dataset, demonstrating its superior performances in terms of appearance quality and rendering efficiency.

Shunyuan Zheng, Boyao Zhou, Ruizhi Shao et al.

We present a new approach, termed GPS-Gaussian, for synthesizing novel views of a character in a real-time manner. The proposed method enables 2K-resolution rendering under a sparse-view camera setting. Unlike the original Gaussian Splatting or neural implicit rendering methods that necessitate per-subject optimizations, we introduce Gaussian parameter maps defined on the source views and regress directly Gaussian Splatting properties for instant novel view synthesis without any fine-tuning or optimization. To this end, we train our Gaussian parameter regression module on a large amount of human scan data, jointly with a depth estimation module to lift 2D parameter maps to 3D space. The proposed framework is fully differentiable and experiments on several datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods while achieving an exceeding rendering speed.

Yating Wang, Yuan Sun, Xuan Wang et al.

Recent 3D-aware head generative models based on 3D Gaussian Splatting achieve real-time, photorealistic and view-consistent head synthesis. However, a fundamental limitation persists: the deep entanglement of illumination and intrinsic appearance prevents controllable relighting. Existing disentanglement methods rely on strong assumptions to enable weakly supervised learning, which restricts their capacity for complex illumination. To address this challenge, we introduce HeadLighter, a novel supervised framework that learns a physically plausible decomposition of appearance and illumination in head generative models. Specifically, we design a dual-branch architecture that separately models lighting-invariant head attributes and physically grounded rendering components. A progressive disentanglement training is employed to gradually inject head appearance priors into the generative architecture, supervised by multi-view images captured under controlled light conditions with a light stage setup. We further introduce a distillation strategy to generate high-quality normals for realistic rendering. Experiments demonstrate that our method preserves high-quality generation and real-time rendering, while simultaneously supporting explicit lighting and viewpoint editing. We will publicly release our code and dataset.

Boyao Zhou, Shunyuan Zheng, Hanzhang Tu et al.

Differentiable rendering techniques have recently shown promising results for free-viewpoint video synthesis of characters. However, such methods, either Gaussian Splatting or neural implicit rendering, typically necessitate per-subject optimization which does not meet the requirement of real-time rendering in an interactive application. We propose a generalizable Gaussian Splatting approach for high-resolution image rendering under a sparse-view camera setting. To this end, we introduce Gaussian parameter maps defined on the source views and directly regress Gaussian properties for instant novel view synthesis without any fine-tuning or optimization. We train our Gaussian parameter regression module on human-only data or human-scene data, jointly with a depth estimation module to lift 2D parameter maps to 3D space. The proposed framework is fully differentiable with both depth and rendering supervision or with only rendering supervision. We further introduce a regularization term and an epipolar attention mechanism to preserve geometry consistency between two source views, especially when neglecting depth supervision. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods while achieving an exceeding rendering speed.

Hanzhang Tu, Ruizhi Shao, Xue Dong et al.

In this paper, we present a low-budget and high-authenticity bidirectional telepresence system, Tele-Aloha, targeting peer-to-peer communication scenarios. Compared to previous systems, Tele-Aloha utilizes only four sparse RGB cameras, one consumer-grade GPU, and one autostereoscopic screen to achieve high-resolution (2048x2048), real-time (30 fps), low-latency (less than 150ms) and robust distant communication. As the core of Tele-Aloha, we propose an efficient novel view synthesis algorithm for upper-body. Firstly, we design a cascaded disparity estimator for obtaining a robust geometry cue. Additionally a neural rasterizer via Gaussian Splatting is introduced to project latent features onto target view and to decode them into a reduced resolution. Further, given the high-quality captured data, we leverage weighted blending mechanism to refine the decoded image into the final resolution of 2K. Exploiting world-leading autostereoscopic display and low-latency iris tracking, users are able to experience a strong three-dimensional sense even without any wearable head-mounted display device. Altogether, our telepresence system demonstrates the sense of co-presence in real-life experiments, inspiring the next generation of communication.

Jiajun Zhang, Yuxiang Zhang, Hongwen Zhang et al.

Accurately modeling detailed interactions between human/hand and object is an appealing yet challenging task. Current multi-view capture systems are only capable of reconstructing multiple subjects into a single, unified mesh, which fails to model the states of each instance individually during interactions. To address this, previous methods use template-based representations to track human/hand and object. However, the quality of the reconstructions is limited by the descriptive capabilities of the templates so that these methods are inherently struggle with geometry details, pressing deformations and invisible contact surfaces. In this work, we propose an end-to-end Instance-aware Human-Object Interactions recovery (Ins-HOI) framework by introducing an instance-level occupancy field representation. However, the real-captured data is presented as a holistic mesh, unable to provide instance-level supervision. To address this, we further propose a complementary training strategy that leverages synthetic data to introduce instance-level shape priors, enabling the disentanglement of occupancy fields for different instances. Specifically, synthetic data, created by randomly combining individual scans of humans/hands and objects, guides the network to learn a coarse prior of instances. Meanwhile, real-captured data helps in learning the overall geometry and restricting interpenetration in contact areas. As demonstrated in experiments, our method Ins-HOI supports instance-level reconstruction and provides reasonable and realistic invisible contact surfaces even in cases of extremely close interaction. To facilitate the research of this task, we collect a large-scale, high-fidelity 3D scan dataset, including 5.2k high-quality scans with real-world human-chair and hand-object interactions. The code and data will be public for research purposes.

Youxin Pang, Ruizhi Shao, Jiajun Zhang et al.

In this paper, we introduce ManiVideo, a novel method for generating consistent and temporally coherent bimanual hand-object manipulation videos from given motion sequences of hands and objects. The core idea of ManiVideo is the construction of a multi-layer occlusion (MLO) representation that learns 3D occlusion relationships from occlusion-free normal maps and occlusion confidence maps. By embedding the MLO structure into the UNet in two forms, the model enhances the 3D consistency of dexterous hand-object manipulation. To further achieve the generalizable grasping of objects, we integrate Objaverse, a large-scale 3D object dataset, to address the scarcity of video data, thereby facilitating the learning of extensive object consistency. Additionally, we propose an innovative training strategy that effectively integrates multiple datasets, supporting downstream tasks such as human-centric hand-object manipulation video generation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach not only achieves video generation with plausible hand-object interaction and generalizable objects, but also outperforms existing SOTA methods.

Ruizhi Shao, Jingxiang Sun, Cheng Peng et al.

We introduce Control4D, an innovative framework for editing dynamic 4D portraits using text instructions. Our method addresses the prevalent challenges in 4D editing, notably the inefficiencies of existing 4D representations and the inconsistent editing effect caused by diffusion-based editors. We first propose GaussianPlanes, a novel 4D representation that makes Gaussian Splatting more structured by applying plane-based decomposition in 3D space and time. This enhances both efficiency and robustness in 4D editing. Furthermore, we propose to leverage a 4D generator to learn a more continuous generation space from inconsistent edited images produced by the diffusion-based editor, which effectively improves the consistency and quality of 4D editing. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates the superiority of Control4D, including significantly reduced training time, high-quality rendering, and spatial-temporal consistency in 4D portrait editing. The link to our project website is https://control4darxiv.github.io.