Recovering Facial Reflectance and Geometry from Multi-view Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, multi-view system that accurately recovers facial geometry and both diffuse and specular reflectance maps from just two video streams, enabling photorealistic face rendering.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-view, model-based optimization approach combining 3DMM and Blinn-Phong models for high-fidelity facial reflectance and geometry recovery from minimal setup.

Findings

Successfully recovers detailed diffuse and specular reflectance maps

Achieves high-fidelity facial geometry reconstruction

Enables photorealistic rendering under new viewpoints and lighting

Abstract

While the problem of estimating shapes and diffuse reflectances of human faces from images has been extensively studied, there is relatively less work done on recovering the specular albedo. This paper presents a lightweight solution for inferring photorealistic facial reflectance and geometry. Our system processes video streams from two views of a subject, and outputs two reflectance maps for diffuse and specular albedos, as well as a vector map of surface normals. A model-based optimization approach is used, consisting of the three stages of multi-view face model fitting, facial reflectance inference and facial geometry refinement. Our approach is based on a novel formulation built upon the 3D morphable model (3DMM) for representing 3D textured faces in conjunction with the Blinn-Phong reflection model. It has the advantage of requiring only a simple setup with two video streams, and is able to exploit the interaction between the diffuse and specular reflections across multiple views as well as time frames. As a result, the method is able to reliably recover high-fidelity facial reflectance and geometry, which facilitates various applications such as generating photorealistic facial images under new viewpoints or illumination conditions.