We present a method to learn the 3D surface of objects directly from a collection of images. Previous work achieved this capability by exploiting additional manual annotation, such as object pose, 3D surface templates, temporal continuity of videos, manually selected landmarks, and foreground background masks. In contrast, our method does not make use of any such annotation. Rather, it builds a generative model, a convolutional neural network, which, given a noise vector sample, outputs the 3D surface and texture of an object and a background image. These 3 components combined with an additional random viewpoint vector are then fed to a differential renderer to produce a view of the sampled object and background. Our general principle is that if the output of the renderer, the generated image, is realistic, then its input, the generated 3D and texture, should also be realistic. To achieve realism, the generative model is trained adversarially against a discriminator that tries to distinguish between the output of the renderer and real images from the given data set. Moreover, our generative model can be paired with an encoder and trained as an autoencoder, to automatically extract the 3D shape, texture and pose of the object in an image. Our trained generative model and encoder show promising results both on real and synthetic data, which demonstrate for the first time that fully unsupervised 3D learning from image collections is possible.
In this work we focus on learning a generative model. 3D morphable models (3DMM) @cite_34 @cite_25 are trained with high quality face scans and provide a high quality template for face reconstruction and recognition. Tran al @cite_14 and Genova al @cite_17 train neural networks for regressing the parameters of 3DMMs. Model-based Face Autoencoders (MoFA) and Genova al @cite_24 @cite_8 only use unlabelled training data, but they rely on existing models that used supervision. Therefore, with different object categories, these methods require a new pre-training of the 3DMM and knowledge of what 3D objects they need to reconstruct, while our method applies directly to any category without prior knowledge on what 3D shape the objects have.
@cite_14 @cite_8 @cite_24 @cite_34 @cite_25 @cite_17
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The 3D shapes of faces are well known to be discriminative. Yet despite this, they are rarely used for face recognition and always under controlled viewing conditions. We claim that this is a symptom of a serious but often overlooked problem with existing methods for single view 3D face reconstruction: when applied in the wild, their 3D estimates are either unstable and change for different photos of the same subject or they are over-regularized and generic. In response, we describe a robust method for regressing discriminative 3D morphable face models (3DMM). We use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to regress 3DMM shape and texture parameters directly from an input photo. We overcome the shortage of training data required for this purpose by offering a method for generating huge numbers of labeled examples. The 3D estimates produced by our CNN surpass state of the art accuracy on the MICC data set. Coupled with a 3D-3D face matching pipeline, we show the first competitive face recognition results on the LFW, YTF and IJB-A benchmarks using 3D face shapes as representations, rather than the opaque deep feature vectors used by other modern systems. In this work we propose a novel model-based deep convolutional autoencoder that addresses the highly challenging problem of reconstructing a 3D human face from a single in-the-wild color image. To this end, we combine a convolutional encoder network with an expert-designed generative model that serves as decoder. The core innovation is our new differentiable parametric decoder that encapsulates image formation analytically based on a generative model. Our decoder takes as input a code vector with exactly defined semantic meaning that encodes detailed face pose, shape, expression, skin reflectance and scene illumination. Due to this new way of combining CNN-based with model-based face reconstruction, the CNN-based encoder learns to extract semantically meaningful parameters from a single monocular input image. For the first time, a CNN encoder and an expert-designed generative model can be trained end-to-end in an unsupervised manner, which renders training on very large (unlabeled) real world data feasible. The obtained reconstructions compare favorably to current state-of-the-art approaches in terms of quality and richness of representation. In this paper, a new technique for modeling textured 3D faces is introduced. 3D faces can either be generated automatically from one or more photographs, or modeled directly through an intuitive user interface. Users are assisted in two key problems of computer aided face modeling. First, new face images or new 3D face models can be registered automatically by computing dense one-to-one correspondence to an internal face model. Second, the approach regulates the naturalness of modeled faces avoiding faces with an “unlikely” appearance. Starting from an example set of 3D face models, we derive a morphable face model by transforming the shape and texture of the examples into a vector space representation. New faces and expressions can be modeled by forming linear combinations of the prototypes. Shape and texture constraints derived from the statistics of our example faces are used to guide manual modeling or automated matching algorithms. We show 3D face reconstructions from single images and their applications for photo-realistic image manipulations. We also demonstrate face manipulations according to complex parameters such as gender, fullness of a face or its distinctiveness. We present a method for training a regression network from image pixels to 3D morphable model coordinates using only unlabeled photographs. The training loss is based on features from a facial recognition network, computed on-the-fly by rendering the predicted faces with a differentiable renderer. To make training from features feasible and avoid network fooling effects, we introduce three objectives: a batch distribution loss that encourages the output distribution to match the distribution of the morphable model, a loopback loss that ensures the network can correctly reinterpret its own output, and a multi-view identity loss that compares the features of the predicted 3D face and the input photograph from multiple viewing angles. We train a regression network using these objectives, a set of unlabeled photographs, and the morphable model itself, and demonstrate state-of-the-art results.