Learning 3D Faces from Photo-Realistic Facial Synthesis

We present an approach to efficiently learn an accurate and complete 3D face model from a single image. Previous methods heavily rely on 3D Morphable Models to populate the facial shape space as well as an over-simplified shading model for image formulation. By contrast, our method directly augments a large set of 3D faces from a compact collection of facial scans and employs a high-quality rendering engine to synthesize the corresponding photo-realistic facial images. We first use a deep neural network to regress vertex coordinates from the given image and then refine them by a non-rigid deformation process to more accurately capture local shape similarity. We have conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach on 2D-to-3D facial shape inference, especially its excellent generalization property on real-world selfie images.