NeuFace: Realistic 3D Neural Face Rendering from Multi-view Images

Mingwu Zheng, Haiyu Zhang, Hongyu Yang, Di Huang

Abstract: Realistic face rendering from multi-view images is beneficial to various computer vision and graphics applications. Due to the complex spatially-varying reflectance properties and geometry characteristics of faces, however, it remains challenging to recover 3D facial representations both faithfully and efficiently in the current studies. This paper presents a novel 3D face rendering model, namely NeuFace, to learn accurate and physically-meaningful underlying 3D representations by neural rendering techniques. It naturally incorporates the neural BRDFs into physically based rendering, capturing sophisticated facial geometry and appearance clues in a collaborative manner. Specifically, we introduce an approximated BRDF integration and a simple yet new low-rank prior, which effectively lower the ambiguities and boost the performance of the facial BRDFs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of NeuFace in human face rendering, along with a decent generalization ability to common objects.