PanoHair: Detailed Hair Strand Synthesis on Volumetric Heads
This addresses the problem of high-fidelity hair synthesis for digital human creation, offering a streamlined alternative to complex multi-view acquisition setups.
The paper tackles the challenge of realistic hair strand synthesis for digital humans by introducing PanoHair, which generates diverse hairstyles from latent codes and produces clean hair meshes in under 5 seconds, significantly improving efficiency over existing methods.
Achieving realistic hair strand synthesis is essential for creating lifelike digital humans, but producing high-fidelity hair strand geometry remains a significant challenge. Existing methods require a complex setup for data acquisition, involving multi-view images captured in constrained studio environments. Additionally, these methods have longer hair volume estimation and strand synthesis times, which hinder efficiency. We introduce PanoHair, a model that estimates head geometry as signed distance fields using knowledge distillation from a pre-trained generative teacher model for head synthesis. Our approach enables the prediction of semantic segmentation masks and 3D orientations specifically for the hair region of the estimated geometry. Our method is generative and can generate diverse hairstyles with latent space manipulations. For real images, our approach involves an inversion process to infer latent codes and produces visually appealing hair strands, offering a streamlined alternative to complex multi-view data acquisition setups. Given the latent code, PanoHair generates a clean manifold mesh for the hair region in under 5 seconds, along with semantic and orientation maps, marking a significant improvement over existing methods, as demonstrated in our experiments.