We present Dynamic Neural Portraits, a novel approach to the problem of full-head reenactment. Our method generates photo-realistic video portraits by explicitly controlling head pose, facial expressions and eye gaze. Our proposed architecture is different from existing methods that rely on GAN-based image-to-image translation networks for transforming renderings of 3D faces into photo-realistic images. Instead, we build our system upon a 2D coordinate-based MLP with controllable dynamics. Our intuition to adopt a 2D-based representation, as opposed to recent 3D NeRF-like systems, stems from the fact that video portraits are captured by monocular stationary cameras, therefore, only a single viewpoint of the scene is available. Primarily, we condition our generative model on expression blendshapes, nonetheless, we show that our system can be successfully driven by audio features as well. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is 270 times faster than recent NeRF-based reenactment methods, with our networks achieving speeds of 24 fps for resolutions up to 1024×1024, while outperforming prior works in terms of visual quality.

We present Free-HeadGAN, a person-generic neural talking head synthesis system. We show that modeling faces with sparse 3D facial landmarks is sufficient for achieving state-of-the-art generative performance, without relying on strong statistical priors of the face, such as 3D Morphable Models. Apart from 3D pose and facial expressions, our method is capable of fully transferring the eye gaze, from a driving actor to a source identity. Our complete pipeline consists of three components: a canonical 3D key-point estimator that regresses 3D pose and expression-related deformations, a gaze estimation network and a generator that is built upon the architecture of HeadGAN. We further experiment with an extension of our generator to accommodate few-shot learning using an attention mechanism, in case multiple source images are available. Compared to recent methods for reenactment and motion transfer, our system achieves higher photo-realism combined with superior identity preservation, while offering explicit gaze control.

Recent attempts to solve the problem of head reenactment using a single reference image have shown promising results. However, most of them either perform poorly in terms of photo-realism, or fail to meet the identity preservation problem, or do not fully transfer the driving pose and expression. We propose HeadGAN, a novel system that conditions synthesis on 3D face representations, which can be extracted from any driving video and adapted to the facial geometry of any reference image, disentangling identity from expression. We further improve mouth movements, by utilising audio features as a complementary input. The 3D face representation enables HeadGAN to be further used as an efficient method for compression and reconstruction and a tool for expression and pose editing.

In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning architecture for facial reenactment. In particular, contrary to the model-based approaches or recent frame-based methods that use Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) to generate individual frames, we propose a novel method that (a) exploits the special structure of facial motion (paying particular attention to mouth motion) and (b) enforces temporal consistency. We demonstrate that the proposed method can transfer facial expressions, pose and gaze of a source actor to a target video in a photo-realistic fashion more accurately than state-of-the-art methods.

Video-to-video synthesis is a challenging problem aiming at learning a translation function between a sequence of semantic maps and a photo-realistic video depicting the characteristics of a driving video. We propose a head-to-head system of our own implementation capable of fully transferring the human head 3D pose, facial expressions and eye gaze from a source to a target actor, while preserving the identity of the target actor. Our system produces high-fidelity, temporally-smooth and photo-realistic synthetic videos faithfully transferring the human time-varying head attributes from the source to the target actor. Our proposed implementation: 1) works in real time (~20 fps), 2) runs on a commodity laptop with a webcam as the only input, 3) is interactive, allowing the participant to drive a target person, e.g. a celebrity, politician, etc, instantly by varying their expressions, head pose, and eye gaze, and visualising the synthesised video concurrently.