We propose a neural rendering-based system that creates head avatars from a single photograph. Our approach models a person's appearance by decomposing it into two layers. The first layer is a pose-dependent coarse image that is synthesized by a small neural network. The second layer is defined by a pose-independent texture image that contains high-frequency details. The texture image is generated offline, warped and added to the coarse image to ensure a high effective resolution of synthesized head views. We compare our system to analogous state-of-the-art systems in terms of visual quality and speed. The experiments show significant inference speedup over previous neural head avatar models for a given visual quality. We also report on a real-time smartphone-based implementation of our system.
@article{arxiv.2008.10174,
title = {Fast Bi-layer Neural Synthesis of One-Shot Realistic Head Avatars},
author = {Egor Zakharov and Aleksei Ivakhnenko and Aliaksandra Shysheya and Victor Lempitsky},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.10174},
year = {2020}
}