Pixel3DMM: Versatile Screen-Space Priors for Single-Image 3D Face Reconstruction

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission9700 Authors

Keywords: Single Image Face Reconstruction, Face Tracking, Foundation Model Finetuning

TL;DR: Fine-tuning image foundation models to predict valuable geometric cues for face tracing.

Abstract: We address the 3D reconstruction of human faces from a single RGB image. To this end, we propose Pixel3DMM, a set of highly-generalized vision transformers which predict per-pixel geometric cues in order to constrain the optimization of a 3D morphable face model (3DMM). We exploit the latent features of the DINO foundation model, and introduce a tailored surface normal and uv-coordinate prediction head. We train our model by registering three high-quality 3D face datasets against the FLAME mesh topology, which results in a total of over 1,000 identities and 976K images. For 3D face reconstruction, we propose a FLAME fitting opitmization that solves for the 3DMM parameters from the uv-coordinate and normal estimates. To evaluate our method, we introduce a new benchmark for single-image face reconstruction, which features high diversity facial expressions, viewing angles, and ethnicities. Crucially, our benchmark is the first to evaluate both posed and neutral facial geometry. Ultimately, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SoTA) by over 15\% in terms of geometric accuracy for posed facial expressions.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

Submission Number: 9700