Reconstruction and Animation of Realistic Head Avatars (Talk)

Digital humans, or realistic avatars, are a centerpiece of future telepresence and special effects systems, and human head modeling is one of their main components. The abovementioned applications, however, are highly demanding in terms of avatar creation speed, as well as realism, and controllability. This talk will focus on the approaches that create controllable and detailed 3D head avatars using the data from consumer-grade devices, such as smartphones, in an uncalibrated and unconstrained capture setting. We will discuss leveraging in-the-wild internet videos and synthetic data sources to achieve a high diversity of facial expressions and appearance personalization, including detailed hair modeling. We also showcase how the resulting human-centric assets can be integrated into virtual environments for real-time telepresence and entertainment applications, illustrating the future of digital communication and gaming.