arXiv Computer Vision

Fresco++: Frequency-Guided and Canonical-Consistent Optimization for Fine-Grained Head Avatar Modeling

Fresco++ is a unified optimization framework for fine‑grained, view‑consistent head avatar reconstruction. It uses a frequency‑guided curriculum that first stabilizes low‑frequency structures before adding high‑frequency constraints, and a Canonical Group Consensus that links local observations across viewpoints to enforce cross‑view consistency. The method incorporates geometric and visibility screening and aggregates multi‑view evidence in feature space, achieving stable optimization from coarse to fine details without extra rendering of auxiliary views.

arXiv AI
Oct 19

OMEGA-Avatar: One-shot Modeling of 360{\deg} Gaussian Avatars

OMEGA-Avatar is a feed‑forward framework that creates a 360° complete, animatable 3D Gaussian head from a single image. It introduces a semantic‑aware mesh deformation module to improve hair modeling while preserving topology, and a multi‑view feature splatting module that builds a shared canonical UV representation for consistent, high‑frequency detail across all viewpoints. Experiments show it outperforms existing baselines in full‑head completeness and identity preservation.

By Zehao Xia, Yiqun Wang, Zhengda Lu, Kai Liu, Jun Xiao, Peter Wonka
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

GHARP: Real-time Gaussian Head Animation from Large-scale Reconstruction Prior

GHARP is a two‑stage method that animates 3D human heads in real time using a large‑scale reconstruction prior. The first offline identity stage builds a compact Gaussian representation of a subject’s geometry and appearance, while the lightweight runtime animation stage predicts expression‑dependent residuals in a semantically structured latent space. A body alignment network further refines the animation by aligning body pose and clothing, enabling state‑of‑the‑art quality on the Ava‑256 benchmark with significantly faster performance and fewer Gaussians.

By Ali Benlalah, Sepehr Johari, Patricia Vitoria, Armin Kappeler, Artem Sevastopolsky, Alexander Jung, Gabriele Fanelli, Kevin Mader, Manuel Breitenstein, Claudia Pl\"uss, Jan R\"uegg, Simon Biland, Thomas Etterlin, Dmitry Kostiaev, Mathias Deschler, Brian Amberg, Sebastian Martin
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 19

Video Diffusion Avatars: Taming Video Diffusion Models into Controllable 3D Avatars

Video Diffusion Avatars (VDAs) fine‑tune video diffusion models to generate photo‑realistic, multi‑view consistent avatars from a single image, allowing precise control over camera viewpoint, facial expression, and upper‑body pose. VDAs replace traditional 3D morphable models with a learned expression space, overcoming viewpoint bias through disentanglement and enabling independent control of expression, pose, and viewpoint via proxy‑mesh renderings. The method trains efficiently—34 hours on a single A100—and outperforms state‑of‑the‑art single‑image 3D avatars, improving novel‑view reenactment metrics and producing physically plausible hair dynamics, shadows, reflections, and refractions.

By Simon Giebenhain, Tobias Kirschstein, Liam Schoneveld, Davide Davoli, Zhe Chen, Matthias Nie{\ss}ner
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 28

NBAvatar: Neural Billboards Avatars with Realistic Hand-Face Interaction

NBAvatar is a method for realistic rendering of head avatars that handles non‑rigid deformations caused by hand‑face interaction. It introduces a hybrid implicit‑explicit representation, combining explicit oriented planar primitives with implicit neural rendering, and uses a geometry‑aware training scheme to jointly optimize these representations. The approach achieves up to 53% LPIPS reduction compared to Gaussian‑based avatar methods, improves PSNR and SSIM, and surpasses the state‑of‑the‑art InteractAvatar in structural similarity for novel‑view and novel‑pose rendering.

By David Svitov, Mahtab Dahaghin, Pietro Morerio, Alessio Del Bue
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

DirectSwap: Paired, Mask-Free Video Head Swapping with Full-Reference Evaluation

The paper introduces DirectSwap, a mask‑free video head‑swapping method that leverages a newly created cross‑identity paired dataset, HeadSwapBench. By synthesizing expression‑synchronized video pairs from real footage, the authors provide frame‑aligned ground truth for full‑reference evaluation of identity, expression, pose, reconstruction fidelity, and temporal stability. DirectSwap outperforms traditional same‑identity masked reconstruction, especially when head silhouettes change, and can restore non‑head content without external segmentation.

By Yanan Wang, Shengcai Liao, Panwen Hu, Xin Li, Fan Yang, Guangxi Liu, Xiaodan Liang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

AGORA: Adversarial Generation Of Real-time Animatable 3D Gaussian Head Avatars

AGORA is a new framework that extends 3D Gaussian Splatting with a generative adversarial network to produce high‑fidelity, animatable 3D head avatars. It introduces a lightweight FLAME‑conditioned deformation branch that predicts per‑Gaussian residuals for identity‑preserving, fine‑grained expression control, and a dual‑discriminator training scheme that enforces expression fidelity. The system achieves real‑time inference at 250 FPS on a single GPU and, for the first time, CPU‑only animatable 3DGS avatar synthesis at ~9 FPS.

By Ramazan Fazylov, Sergey Zagoruyko, Aleksandr Parkin, Stamatis Lefkimmiatis, Ivan Laptev