GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians

Shenhan Qian, Tobias Kirschstein, Liam Schoneveld, Davide Davoli, Simon Giebenhain, Matthias Nießner

Abstract: We introduce GaussianAvatars 1 1 Project page: https://shenhanqian.github.io/gaussian-avatars, a new method to create photorealistic head avatars that are fully controllable in terms of expression, pose, and viewpoint. The core idea is a dynamic 3D representation based on 3D Gaussian splats that are rigged to a parametric morphable face model. This combination facilitates photorealistic rendering while allowing for precise animation control via the underlying parametric model, e.g., through expression transfer from a driving sequence or by manually changing the morphable model parameters. We parameterize each splat by a local coordinate frame of a triangle and optimize for explicit dis-placement offset to obtain a more accurate geometric representation. During avatar reconstruction, we jointly optimize for the morphable model parameters and Gaussian splat parameters in an end-to-end fashion. We demonstrate the animation capabilities of our photorealistic avatar in several challenging scenarios. For instance, we show reen-actments from a driving video, where our method outperforms existing works by a significant margin.