Automatic Animation of Hair Blowing in Still Portrait Photos

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for animating hair in still portrait photos by treating hair wisps as instances and using advanced segmentation and animation techniques, resulting in more natural and pleasing hair motion.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach that combines instance segmentation with wisp-aware animation to effectively animate hair in still images, addressing a challenging problem in image animation.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in qualitative and quantitative evaluations

Produces more natural and pleasing hair animations

Effectively extracts and animates hair wisps with minimal artifacts

Abstract

We propose a novel approach to animate human hair in a still portrait photo. Existing work has largely studied the animation of fluid elements such as water and fire. However, hair animation for a real image remains underexplored, which is a challenging problem, due to the high complexity of hair structure and dynamics. Considering the complexity of hair structure, we innovatively treat hair wisp extraction as an instance segmentation problem, where a hair wisp is referred to as an instance. With advanced instance segmentation networks, our method extracts meaningful and natural hair wisps. Furthermore, we propose a wisp-aware animation module that animates hair wisps with pleasing motions without noticeable artifacts. The extensive experiments show the superiority of our method. Our method provides the most pleasing and compelling viewing experience in the qualitative experiments and outperforms state-of-the-art still-image animation methods by a large margin in the quantitative evaluation. Project url: \url{https://nevergiveu.github.io/AutomaticHairBlowing/}