Is it real? Deep Neural Face Reconstruction and Rendering
Michael Zollhöfer
(Stanford University)
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Date: October 24, 2018
Description:
A broad range of applications in visual effects, computer animation, autonomous driving, and man-machine interaction heavily depend on robust and fast algorithms to obtain high-quality reconstructions of our physical world in terms of geometry, motion, reflectance, and illumination. Especially, with the increasing popularity of virtual, augmented and mixed reality devices, there comes a rising demand for real-time and low-latency solutions.
This talk covers data-parallel optimization and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to tackle the underlying 3D and 4D reconstruction problems based on novel mathematical models and fast algorithms. The particular focus of this talk is on self-supervised face reconstruction from a collection of unlabeled in-the-wild images. The proposed approach can be trained end-to-end without dense annotations by fusing a convolutional encoder with a differentiable expert-designed renderer and a self-supervised training loss.
The resulting reconstructions are the foundation for advanced video editing effects, such as photo-realistic re-animation of portrait videos. The core of the proposed approach is a generative rendering-to-video translation network that takes computer graphics renderings as input and generates photo-realistic modified target videos that mimic the source content. With the ability to freely control the underlying parametric face model, we are able to demonstrate a large variety of video rewrite applications. For instance, we can reenact the full head using interactive user-controlled editing and realize high-fidelity visual dubbing
Further Information:
Michael Zollhöfer is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University. His stay at Stanford is funded by a postdoctoral fellowship of the Max Planck Center for Visual Computing and Communication (MPC-VCC), which he received for his work in the fields of computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. Before joining Stanford University, Michael was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics working with Christian Theobalt. He received his PhD from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg for his work on real-time reconstruction of static and dynamic scenes. During his PhD, he was an intern at Microsoft Research Cambridge working with Shahram Izadi on data-parallel optimization for real-time template-based surface reconstruction. The primary goal of his research is to teach computers to reconstruct and analyze our world at frame rate based on visual input. To this end, he develops key technology to invert the image formation models of computer graphics based on data-parallel optimization and state-of-the-art deep learning techniques. The reconstructed intrinsic scene properties, such as geometry, motion, reflectance, and illumination are the foundation for a broad range of applications not only in virtual and augmented reality, visual effects, computer animation, autonomous driving, and man-machine interaction, but also in other fields such as medicine and biomechanics.
Created: Thursday, October 25th, 2018