Peng Chen

Xiaobao Wei, Peng Chen, Guangyu Li et al.

Gaze estimation encounters generalization challenges when dealing with out-of-distribution data. To address this problem, recent methods use neural radiance fields (NeRF) to generate augmented data. However, existing methods based on NeRF are computationally expensive and lack facial details. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become the prevailing representation of neural fields. While 3DGS has been extensively examined in head avatars, it faces challenges with accurate gaze control and generalization across different subjects. In this work, we propose GazeGaussian, the first high-fidelity gaze redirection method that uses a two-stream 3DGS model to represent the face and eye regions separately. Leveraging the unstructured nature of 3DGS, we develop a novel representation of the eye for rigid eye rotation based on the target gaze direction. To enable synthesis generalization across various subjects, we integrate an expression-guided module to inject subject-specific information into the neural renderer. Comprehensive experiments show that GazeGaussian outperforms existing methods in rendering speed, gaze redirection accuracy, and facial synthesis across multiple datasets. The code is available at: https://ucwxb.github.io/GazeGaussian.

Peng Chen, Xiaobao Wei, Qingpo Wuwu et al.

Reconstructing high-fidelity 3D head avatars is crucial in various applications such as virtual reality. The pioneering methods reconstruct realistic head avatars with Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), which have been limited by training and rendering speed. Recent methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) significantly improve the efficiency of training and rendering. However, the surface inconsistency of 3DGS results in subpar geometric accuracy; later, 2DGS uses 2D surfels to enhance geometric accuracy at the expense of rendering fidelity. To leverage the benefits of both 2DGS and 3DGS, we propose a novel method named MixedGaussianAvatar for realistically and geometrically accurate head avatar reconstruction. Our main idea is to utilize 2D Gaussians to reconstruct the surface of the 3D head, ensuring geometric accuracy. We attach the 2D Gaussians to the triangular mesh of the FLAME model and connect additional 3D Gaussians to those 2D Gaussians where the rendering quality of 2DGS is inadequate, creating a mixed 2D-3D Gaussian representation. These 2D-3D Gaussians can then be animated using FLAME parameters. We further introduce a progressive training strategy that first trains the 2D Gaussians and then fine-tunes the mixed 2D-3D Gaussians. We use a unified mixed Gaussian representation to integrate the two modalities of 2D image and 3D mesh. Furthermore, the comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of MixedGaussianAvatar. The code will be released.

Hu Wang, Peng Chen, Bohan Zhuang et al.

With the rising popularity of intelligent mobile devices, it is of great practical significance to develop accurate, realtime and energy-efficient image Super-Resolution (SR) inference methods. A prevailing method for improving the inference efficiency is model quantization, which allows for replacing the expensive floating-point operations with efficient fixed-point or bitwise arithmetic. To date, it is still challenging for quantized SR frameworks to deliver feasible accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Here, we propose a Fully Quantized image Super-Resolution framework (FQSR) to jointly optimize efficiency and accuracy. In particular, we target on obtaining end-to-end quantized models for all layers, especially including skip connections, which was rarely addressed in the literature. We further identify training obstacles faced by low-bit SR networks and propose two novel methods accordingly. The two difficulites are caused by 1) activation and weight distributions being vastly distinctive in different layers; 2) the inaccurate approximation of the quantization. We apply our quantization scheme on multiple mainstream super-resolution architectures, including SRResNet, SRGAN and EDSR. Experimental results show that our FQSR using low bits quantization can achieve on par performance compared with the full-precision counterparts on five benchmark datasets and surpass state-of-the-art quantized SR methods with significantly reduced computational cost and memory consumption.