Wenhan Zhu

Wei Lu, Wei Sun, Xiongkuo Min et al.

The 4K content can deliver a more immersive visual experience to consumers due to the huge improvement of spatial resolution. However, existing blind image quality assessment (BIQA) methods are not suitable for the original and upscaled 4K contents due to the expanded resolution and specific distortions. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based BIQA model for 4K content, which on one hand can recognize true and pseudo 4K content and on the other hand can evaluate their perceptual visual quality. Considering the characteristic that high spatial resolution can represent more abundant high-frequency information, we first propose a Grey-level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) based texture complexity measure to select three representative image patches from a 4K image, which can reduce the computational complexity and is proven to be very effective for the overall quality prediction through experiments. Then we extract different kinds of visual features from the intermediate layers of the convolutional neural network (CNN) and integrate them into the quality-aware feature representation. Finally, two multilayer perception (MLP) networks are utilized to map the quality-aware features into the class probability and the quality score for each patch respectively. The overall quality index is obtained through the average pooling of patch results. The proposed model is trained through the multi-task learning manner and we introduce an uncertainty principle to balance the losses of the classification and regression tasks. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms all compared BIQA metrics on four 4K content quality assessment databases.

Sijing Wu, Yichao Yan, Yunhao Li et al.

To bring digital avatars into people's lives, it is highly demanded to efficiently generate complete, realistic, and animatable head avatars. This task is challenging, and it is difficult for existing methods to satisfy all the requirements at once. To achieve these goals, we propose GANHead (Generative Animatable Neural Head Avatar), a novel generative head model that takes advantages of both the fine-grained control over the explicit expression parameters and the realistic rendering results of implicit representations. Specifically, GANHead represents coarse geometry, fine-gained details and texture via three networks in canonical space to obtain the ability to generate complete and realistic head avatars. To achieve flexible animation, we define the deformation filed by standard linear blend skinning (LBS), with the learned continuous pose and expression bases and LBS weights. This allows the avatars to be directly animated by FLAME parameters and generalize well to unseen poses and expressions. Compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, GANHead achieves superior performance on head avatar generation and raw scan fitting.

Zicheng Zhang, Wei Sun, Xiongkuo Min et al.

To support the application scenarios where high-resolution (HR) images are urgently needed, various single image super-resolution (SISR) algorithms are developed. However, SISR is an ill-posed inverse problem, which may bring artifacts like texture shift, blur, etc. to the reconstructed images, thus it is necessary to evaluate the quality of super-resolution images (SRIs). Note that most existing image quality assessment (IQA) methods were developed for synthetically distorted images, which may not work for SRIs since their distortions are more diverse and complicated. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a no-reference deep-learning image quality assessment method based on frequency maps because the artifacts caused by SISR algorithms are quite sensitive to frequency information. Specifically, we first obtain the high-frequency map (HM) and low-frequency map (LM) of SRI by using Sobel operator and piecewise smooth image approximation. Then, a two-stream network is employed to extract the quality-aware features of both frequency maps. Finally, the features are regressed into a single quality value using fully connected layers. The experimental results show that our method outperforms all compared IQA models on the selected three super-resolution quality assessment (SRQA) databases.

Wei Lu, Wei Sun, Wenhan Zhu et al.

The intelligent video surveillance system (IVSS) can automatically analyze the content of the surveillance image (SI) and reduce the burden of the manual labour. However, the SIs may suffer quality degradations in the procedure of acquisition, compression, and transmission, which makes IVSS hard to understand the content of SIs. In this paper, we first conduct an example experiment (i.e. the face detection task) to demonstrate that the quality of the SIs has a crucial impact on the performance of the IVSS, and then propose a saliency-based deep neural network for the blind quality assessment of the SIs, which helps IVSS to filter the low-quality SIs and improve the detection and recognition performance. Specifically, we first compute the saliency map of the SI to select the most salient local region since the salient regions usually contain rich semantic information for machine vision and thus have a great impact on the overall quality of the SIs. Next, the convolutional neural network (CNN) is adopted to extract quality-aware features for the whole image and local region, which are then mapped into the global and local quality scores through the fully connected (FC) network respectively. Finally, the overall quality score is computed as the weighted sum of the global and local quality scores. Experimental results on the SI quality database (SIQD) show that the proposed method outperforms all compared state-of-the-art BIQA methods.

Yuhao Cheng, Yichao Yan, Wenhan Zhu et al.

Head generation with diverse identities is an important task in computer vision and computer graphics, widely used in multimedia applications. However, current full head generation methods require a large number of 3D scans or multi-view images to train the model, resulting in expensive data acquisition cost. To address this issue, we propose Head3D, a method to generate full 3D heads with limited multi-view images. Specifically, our approach first extracts facial priors represented by tri-planes learned in EG3D, a 3D-aware generative model, and then proposes feature distillation to deliver the 3D frontal faces into complete heads without compromising head integrity. To mitigate the domain gap between the face and head models, we present dual-discriminators to guide the frontal and back head generation, respectively. Our model achieves cost-efficient and diverse complete head generation with photo-realistic renderings and high-quality geometry representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Head3D, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Zhuo Chen, Xudong Xu, Yichao Yan et al.

Portrait stylization is a long-standing task enabling extensive applications. Although 2D-based methods have made great progress in recent years, real-world applications such as metaverse and games often demand 3D content. On the other hand, the requirement of 3D data, which is costly to acquire, significantly impedes the development of 3D portrait stylization methods. In this paper, inspired by the success of 3D-aware GANs that bridge 2D and 3D domains with 3D fields as the intermediate representation for rendering 2D images, we propose a novel method, dubbed HyperStyle3D, based on 3D-aware GANs for 3D portrait stylization. At the core of our method is a hyper-network learned to manipulate the parameters of the generator in a single forward pass. It not only offers a strong capacity to handle multiple styles with a single model, but also enables flexible fine-grained stylization that affects only texture, shape, or local part of the portrait. While the use of 3D-aware GANs bypasses the requirement of 3D data, we further alleviate the necessity of style images with the CLIP model being the stylization guidance. We conduct an extensive set of experiments across the style, attribute, and shape, and meanwhile, measure the 3D consistency. These experiments demonstrate the superior capability of our HyperStyle3D model in rendering 3D-consistent images in diverse styles, deforming the face shape, and editing various attributes.

Yixuan Gao, Xiongkuo Min, Wenhan Zhu et al.

Recently, image quality has been generally describedby a mean opinion score (MOS). However, we observe that thequality scores of an image given by a group of subjects are verysubjective and diverse. Thus it is not enough to use a MOS todescribe the image quality. In this paper, we propose to describeimage quality using a parameterized distribution rather thana MOS, and an objective method is also proposed to predictthe image quality score distribution (IQSD). At first, the LIVEdatabase is re-recorded. Specifically, we have invited a largegroup of subjects to evaluate the quality of all images in theLIVE database, and each image is evaluated by a large numberof subjects (187 valid subjects), whose scores can form a reliableIQSD. By analyzing the obtained subjective quality scores, wefind that the IQSD can be well modeled by an alpha stable model,and it can reflect much more information than a single MOS, suchas the skewness of opinion score, the subject diversity and themaximum probability score for an image. Therefore, we proposeto model the IQSD using the alpha stable model. Moreover, wepropose a framework and an algorithm to predict the alphastable model based IQSD, where quality features are extractedfrom each image based on structural information and statisticalinformation, and support vector regressors are trained to predictthe alpha stable model parameters. Experimental results verifythe feasibility of using alpha stable model to describe the IQSD,and prove the effectiveness of objective alpha stable model basedIQSD prediction method.

Shengqi Liu, Yuhao Cheng, Zhuo Chen et al.

Generating sewing patterns in garment design is receiving increasing attention due to its CG-friendly and flexible-editing nature. Previous sewing pattern generation methods have been able to produce exquisite clothing, but struggle to design complex garments with detailed control. To address these issues, we propose SewingLDM, a multi-modal generative model that generates sewing patterns controlled by text prompts, body shapes, and garment sketches. Initially, we extend the original vector of sewing patterns into a more comprehensive representation to cover more intricate details and then compress them into a compact latent space. To learn the sewing pattern distribution in the latent space, we design a two-step training strategy to inject the multi-modal conditions, \ie, body shapes, text prompts, and garment sketches, into a diffusion model, ensuring the generated garments are body-suited and detail-controlled. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed method, significantly surpassing previous approaches in terms of complex garment design and various body adaptability. Our project page: https://shengqiliu1.github.io/SewingLDM.

Xingyu Ren, Jiankang Deng, Yuhao Cheng et al.

Recent 3D face reconstruction methods have made remarkable advancements, yet there remain huge challenges in monocular high-quality facial reflectance reconstruction. Existing methods rely on a large amount of light-stage captured data to learn facial reflectance models. However, the lack of subject diversity poses challenges in achieving good generalization and widespread applicability. In this paper, we learn the reflectance prior in image space rather than UV space and present a framework named ID2Reflectance. Our framework can directly estimate the reflectance maps of a single image while using limited reflectance data for training. Our key insight is that reflectance data shares facial structures with RGB faces, which enables obtaining expressive facial prior from inexpensive RGB data thus reducing the dependency on reflectance data. We first learn a high-quality prior for facial reflectance. Specifically, we pretrain multi-domain facial feature codebooks and design a codebook fusion method to align the reflectance and RGB domains. Then, we propose an identity-conditioned swapping module that injects facial identity from the target image into the pre-trained autoencoder to modify the identity of the source reflectance image. Finally, we stitch multi-view swapped reflectance images to obtain renderable assets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits excellent generalization capability and achieves state-of-the-art facial reflectance reconstruction results for in-the-wild faces. Our project page is https://xingyuren.github.io/id2reflectance/.

Xuanchen Li, Jianyu Wang, Yuhao Cheng et al.

Significant progress has been made for speech-driven 3D face animation, but most works focus on learning the motion of mesh/geometry, ignoring the impact of dynamic texture. In this work, we reveal that dynamic texture plays a key role in rendering high-fidelity talking avatars, and introduce a high-resolution 4D dataset \textbf{TexTalk4D}, consisting of 100 minutes of audio-synced scan-level meshes with detailed 8K dynamic textures from 100 subjects. Based on the dataset, we explore the inherent correlation between motion and texture, and propose a diffusion-based framework \textbf{TexTalker} to simultaneously generate facial motions and dynamic textures from speech. Furthermore, we propose a novel pivot-based style injection strategy to capture the complicity of different texture and motion styles, which allows disentangled control. TexTalker, as the first method to generate audio-synced facial motion with dynamic texture, not only outperforms the prior arts in synthesising facial motions, but also produces realistic textures that are consistent with the underlying facial movements. Project page: https://xuanchenli.github.io/TexTalk/.

Xuanchen Li, Yuhao Cheng, Xingyu Ren et al.

4D head capture aims to generate dynamic topological meshes and corresponding texture maps from videos, which is widely utilized in movies and games for its ability to simulate facial muscle movements and recover dynamic textures in pore-squeezing. The industry often adopts the method involving multi-view stereo and non-rigid alignment. However, this approach is prone to errors and heavily reliant on time-consuming manual processing by artists. To simplify this process, we propose Topo4D, a novel framework for automatic geometry and texture generation, which optimizes densely aligned 4D heads and 8K texture maps directly from calibrated multi-view time-series images. Specifically, we first represent the time-series faces as a set of dynamic 3D Gaussians with fixed topology in which the Gaussian centers are bound to the mesh vertices. Afterward, we perform alternative geometry and texture optimization frame-by-frame for high-quality geometry and texture learning while maintaining temporal topology stability. Finally, we can extract dynamic facial meshes in regular wiring arrangement and high-fidelity textures with pore-level details from the learned Gaussians. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves superior results than the current SOTA face reconstruction methods both in the quality of meshes and textures. Project page: https://xuanchenli.github.io/Topo4D/.