Video Face Editing Using Temporal-Spatial-Smooth Warping

TL;DR

The paper introduces a novel temporal-spatial-smooth warping algorithm for video face editing that ensures temporal coherence and spatial smoothness, significantly improving editing quality over existing methods.

Contribution

A new TSSW algorithm that effectively exploits temporal and spatial information for coherent video face editing, outperforming prior image-based warping approaches.

Findings

Effective preservation of spatial smoothness and temporal coherence.

Robustness to inaccurate feature point localization.

Outperforms existing face editing methods.

Abstract

Editing faces in videos is a popular yet challenging aspect of computer vision and graphics, which encompasses several applications including facial attractiveness enhancement, makeup transfer, face replacement, and expression manipulation. Simply applying image-based warping algorithms to video-based face editing produces temporal incoherence in the synthesized videos because it is impossible to consistently localize facial features in two frames representing two different faces in two different videos (or even two consecutive frames representing the same face in one video). Therefore, high performance face editing usually requires significant manual manipulation. In this paper we propose a novel temporal-spatial-smooth warping (TSSW) algorithm to effectively exploit the temporal information in two consecutive frames, as well as the spatial smoothness within each frame. TSSW precisely estimates two control lattices in the horizontal and vertical directions respectively from the corresponding control lattices in the previous frame, by minimizing a novel energy function that unifies a data-driven term, a smoothness term, and feature point constraints. Corresponding warping surfaces then precisely map source frames to the target frames. Experimental testing on facial attractiveness enhancement, makeup transfer, face replacement, and expression manipulation demonstrates that the proposed approaches can effectively preserve spatial smoothness and temporal coherence in editing facial geometry, skin detail, identity, and expression, which outperform the existing face editing methods. In particular, TSSW is robust to subtly inaccurate localization of feature points and is a vast improvement over image-based warping methods.