FaceEraser: Removing Facial Parts for Augmented Reality
This addresses a specific challenge in augmented reality for creating 'blank' faces, but it is incremental as it builds on existing inpainting methods.
The paper tackles the problem of removing facial parts like eyebrows, eyes, mouth, and nose for augmented reality applications, proposing a novel data generation technique and network architecture to improve inpainting quality, with source code released for research.
Our task is to remove all facial parts (e.g., eyebrows, eyes, mouth and nose), and then impose visual elements onto the ``blank'' face for augmented reality. Conventional object removal methods rely on image inpainting techniques (e.g., EdgeConnect, HiFill) that are trained in a self-supervised manner with randomly manipulated image pairs. Specifically, given a set of natural images, randomly masked images are used as inputs and the raw images are treated as ground truths. Whereas, this technique does not satisfy the requirements of facial parts removal, as it is hard to obtain ``ground-truth'' images with real ``blank'' faces. To address this issue, we propose a novel data generation technique to produce paired training data that well mimic the ``blank'' faces. In the mean time, we propose a novel network architecture for improved inpainting quality for our task. Finally, we demonstrate various face-oriented augmented reality applications on top of our facial parts removal model. The source codes are released at \href{https://github.com/duxingren14/FaceEraser}{duxingren14/FaceEraser} on github for research purposes.