Facial Geometric Detail Recovery via Implicit Representation

Learning a dense 3D model with fine-scale details from a single facial image is highly challenging and ill-posed. To address this problem, many approaches fit smooth geometries through facial prior while learning details as additional displacement maps or personalized basis. However, these techniques typically require vast datasets of paired multi-view data or 3D scans, whereas such datasets are scarce and expensive. To alleviate heavy data dependency, we present a robust texture-guided geometric detail recovery approach using only a single in-the-wild facial image. Specifically, we inpaint occluded facial parts, generate complete textures, and build an accurate multi-view dataset of the target subject. In order to estimate the detailed geometry, we define an implicit signed distance function and employ a physically-based implicit renderer to reconstruct fine geometric details from the generated multiview images. Our method not only recovers accurate facial details but also decomposes the diffuse and specular albedo, normals and shading components in a self-supervised way. Finally, we register the implicit shape details to a 3D Morphable Model template, which can be used in traditional modeling and rendering pipelines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can reconstruct impressive facial details from a single image, especially when compared with state-of-the-art methods trained on large datasets.