VoRF Volumetric Relightable Faces

We present VoRF, a learning framework that synthesizes novel views and relighting under any lighting conditions given a single image or a few posed images.
Pramod Rao1 Mallikarjun B R1 Gereon Fox1 Tim Weyrich2 Bernd Bickel3 Hanspeter Pfister4 Wojciech Matusik5 Ayush Tewari1,5 Christian Theobalt1 Mohamed Elgharib1
1Max Planck Institute for Informatics 2Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg 3Insitute of Science and Technology Austria 4Harvard University 5MIT CSAIL
British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 2022

Abstract

Portrait viewpoint and illumination editing is an important problem with several applications in VR/AR, movies, and photography. Comprehensive knowledge of geometry and illumination is critical for obtaining photorealistic results. Current methods are unable to explicitly model in 3D while handing both viewpoint and illumination editing from a single image. In this paper, we propose VoRF, a novel approach that can take evena single portrait image as input and relight human heads under novel illuminations that can be viewed from arbitrary viewpoints. VoRF represents a human head as a continuous volumetric field and learns a prior model of human heads using a coordinate-based MLP with individual latent spaces for identity and illumination. The prior model is learnt in an auto-decoder manner over a diverse class of head shapes and appearances, allowing VoRF to generalize to novel test identities from a single input image. Additionally, VoRF has a reflectance MLP that uses the intermediate features of the prior model for rendering One-Light-at-A-Time (OLAT) images under novel views. We synthesize novel illuminations by combining these OLAT images with target environment maps. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of VoRF for relighting and novel view synthesis, even when applied to unseen subjects under uncontrolled illuminations.

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