Jingjing Shen

Tengfei Wang, Bo Zhang, Ting Zhang et al. · microsoft-research

This paper presents a 3D generative model that uses diffusion models to automatically generate 3D digital avatars represented as neural radiance fields. A significant challenge in generating such avatars is that the memory and processing costs in 3D are prohibitive for producing the rich details required for high-quality avatars. To tackle this problem we propose the roll-out diffusion network (Rodin), which represents a neural radiance field as multiple 2D feature maps and rolls out these maps into a single 2D feature plane within which we perform 3D-aware diffusion. The Rodin model brings the much-needed computational efficiency while preserving the integrity of diffusion in 3D by using 3D-aware convolution that attends to projected features in the 2D feature plane according to their original relationship in 3D. We also use latent conditioning to orchestrate the feature generation for global coherence, leading to high-fidelity avatars and enabling their semantic editing based on text prompts. Finally, we use hierarchical synthesis to further enhance details. The 3D avatars generated by our model compare favorably with those produced by existing generative techniques. We can generate highly detailed avatars with realistic hairstyles and facial hair like beards. We also demonstrate 3D avatar generation from image or text as well as text-guided editability.

Gwangbin Bae, Martin de La Gorce, Tadas Baltrusaitis et al. · cambridge

State-of-the-art face recognition models show impressive accuracy, achieving over 99.8% on Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset. Such models are trained on large-scale datasets that contain millions of real human face images collected from the internet. Web-crawled face images are severely biased (in terms of race, lighting, make-up, etc) and often contain label noise. More importantly, the face images are collected without explicit consent, raising ethical concerns. To avoid such problems, we introduce a large-scale synthetic dataset for face recognition, obtained by rendering digital faces using a computer graphics pipeline. We first demonstrate that aggressive data augmentation can significantly reduce the synthetic-to-real domain gap. Having full control over the rendering pipeline, we also study how each attribute (e.g., variation in facial pose, accessories and textures) affects the accuracy. Compared to SynFace, a recent method trained on GAN-generated synthetic faces, we reduce the error rate on LFW by 52.5% (accuracy from 91.93% to 96.17%). By fine-tuning the network on a smaller number of real face images that could reasonably be obtained with consent, we achieve accuracy that is comparable to the methods trained on millions of real face images.

Erroll Wood, Tadas Baltrusaitis, Charlie Hewitt et al.

Landmarks often play a key role in face analysis, but many aspects of identity or expression cannot be represented by sparse landmarks alone. Thus, in order to reconstruct faces more accurately, landmarks are often combined with additional signals like depth images or techniques like differentiable rendering. Can we keep things simple by just using more landmarks? In answer, we present the first method that accurately predicts 10x as many landmarks as usual, covering the whole head, including the eyes and teeth. This is accomplished using synthetic training data, which guarantees perfect landmark annotations. By fitting a morphable model to these dense landmarks, we achieve state-of-the-art results for monocular 3D face reconstruction in the wild. We show that dense landmarks are an ideal signal for integrating face shape information across frames by demonstrating accurate and expressive facial performance capture in both monocular and multi-view scenarios. This approach is also highly efficient: we can predict dense landmarks and fit our 3D face model at over 150FPS on a single CPU thread. Please see our website: https://microsoft.github.io/DenseLandmarks/.

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.

Zhengyang Shen, Kai-Hung Chang, Erroll Wood et al.

Robust, high-fidelity 3D hand capture, while fundamental to digital human creation, remains challenging with practical multi-view systems that balance rich photometry with the geometric ambiguities of reconstruction arising from limited viewpoint density. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for dynamic hand performance capture and registration, specifically designed for view-efficient setups ($\sim$20 views). We address key challenges with two primary innovations. First, to overcome reconstruction difficulties like limited view overlap and background clutter, our mask-free neural method robustly extracts detailed hand geometry and appearance from unmasked images using scene parameterization and scenario-specific density regularization. Second, addressing registration challenges such as accurately capturing non-linear skin deformations and ensuring plausible results during severe self-contact, we propose a physics-inspired framework. It aligns reconstructions to a personalized hand model by optimizing intrinsic volumetric offsets within its canonical tetrahedral mesh, alongside pose parameters. This approach, supported by robust losses and optimization, captures fine surface deformations, ensures plausible results under severe articulation and self-contact, and demonstrates strong tolerance to input noise. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our automated pipeline on an extensive dataset of over 12,000 sequences, from which we also derive a large-scale, high-quality synthetic 2D/3D hand dataset for training downstream tasks. This showcases its effectiveness for single hands, intricate two-hand interactions, and natural hand-object manipulations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity in view-efficient, unmasked scenarios and highly accurate registration. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/VEPHand/.

Bo Peng, Xu Chen, Yi Gu et al.

The growing demand for high-fidelity 4D hand-object interaction (HOI) data in embodied AI and spatial computing is currently bottlenecked by the reliance on pre-scanned object templates and physical markers. While recent methods have demonstrated promising results in reconstructing 4D hand-object interaction from videos, they are highly sensitive to initial estimates of hand and object poses. Yet, estimating these poses from images is challenging, in particular under severe occlusion which is inherent in hand-object interaction scenarios. We propose a novel system for the robust and accurate reconstruction of hands and objects from synchronized and calibrated multi-view videos without requiring any templates or markers. Our system consists of two main components with key innovations: (1) a multi-view feed-forward transformer model that aggregates cross-view geometry and temporal cues to provide a reliable, metric-consistent initialization for both poses and dense object geometry, and (2) a hand-object physics-aware Gaussian-based optimization framework to refine the initial estimates, integrating tetrahedral constraints, collision refinement, and appearance decomposition to produce physically plausible and visually accurate reconstruction. Validated on public benchmarks and an extensive internal dataset, our pipeline achieves highly robust, artifact-free reconstruction, providing an efficient foundation for automated 4D asset generation. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/HOSTPG/.

Vasileios Choutas, Federica Bogo, Jingjing Shen et al.

Fitting parametric models of human bodies, hands or faces to sparse input signals in an accurate, robust, and fast manner has the promise of significantly improving immersion in AR and VR scenarios. A common first step in systems that tackle these problems is to regress the parameters of the parametric model directly from the input data. This approach is fast, robust, and is a good starting point for an iterative minimization algorithm. The latter searches for the minimum of an energy function, typically composed of a data term and priors that encode our knowledge about the problem's structure. While this is undoubtedly a very successful recipe, priors are often hand defined heuristics and finding the right balance between the different terms to achieve high quality results is a non-trivial task. Furthermore, converting and optimizing these systems to run in a performant way requires custom implementations that demand significant time investments from both engineers and domain experts. In this work, we build upon recent advances in learned optimization and propose an update rule inspired by the classic Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. We show the effectiveness of the proposed neural optimizer on three problems, 3D body estimation from a head-mounted device, 3D body estimation from sparse 2D keypoints and face surface estimation from dense 2D landmarks. Our method can easily be applied to new model fitting problems and offers a competitive alternative to well-tuned 'traditional' model fitting pipelines, both in terms of accuracy and speed.