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Deep Video Portraits (arxiv.org)
2 points by isp on Jun 4, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A network turns plain computer-drawn face renderings into realistic video frames, letting one actor's head motion, expression, gaze, and blinking drive another's face. Unlike earlier tools that copy only expressions, it copies the whole head, and viewers struggled to spot the edits.

Abstract

We present a novel approach that enables photo-realistic re-animation of portrait videos using only an input video. In contrast to existing approaches that are restricted to manipulations of facial expressions only, we are the first to transfer the full 3D head position, head rotation, face expression, eye gaze, and eye blinking from a source actor to a portrait video of a target actor. The core of our approach is a generative neural network with a novel space-time architecture. The network takes as input synthetic renderings of a parametric face model, based on which it predicts photo-realistic video frames for a given target actor. The realism in this rendering-to-video transfer is achieved by careful adversarial training, and as a result, we can create modified target videos that mimic the behavior of the synthetically-created input. In order to enable source-to-target video re-animation, we render a synthetic target video with the reconstructed head animation parameters from a source video, and feed it into the trained network -- thus taking full control of the target. With the ability to freely recombine source and target parameters, we are able to demonstrate a large variety of video rewrite applications without explicitly modeling hair, body or background. For instance, we can reenact the full head using interactive user-controlled editing, and realize high-fidelity visual dubbing. To demonstrate the high quality of our output, we conduct an extensive series of experiments and evaluations, where for instance a user study shows that our video edits are hard to detect.

Hyeongwoo Kim, Pablo Garrido, Ayush Tewari, Weipeng Xu, Justus Thies, Matthias Nießner, Patrick Pérez, Christian Richardt, Michael Zollhöfer, Christian Theobalt
arXiv:1805.11714 · cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.GR · submitted May 29, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · SIGGRAPH 2018, Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc5P2bvfl44

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Also discussed: Jun 2018 (2 points, 1 comment)

Remarkable result. Transforming a video of one person into another person.

Accepted for SIGGRAPH 2018.

Video demonstration (in the first few seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc5P2bvfl44