Levi Valgaerts, Chenglei Wu, Andr
MPI for Informatics; Intel Visual Computing Institute; University of Stuttgart
Portals
Abstract
Recent progress in passive facial performance capture has shown impressively detailed results on highly articulated motion. However, most methods rely on complex multi-camera set-ups, controlled lighting or fiducial markers. This prevents them from being used in general environments, outdoor scenes, during live action on a film set, or by freelance animators and everyday users who want to capture their digital selves. In this paper, we therefore propose a lightweight passive facial performance capture approach that is able to reconstruct high-quality dynamic facial geometry from only a single pair of stereo cameras. Our method succeeds under uncontrolled and time-varying lighting, and also in outdoor scenes. Our approach builds upon and extends recent image-based scene flow computation, lighting estimation and shading-based refinement algorithms. It integrates them into a pipeline that is specifically tailored towards facial performance reconstruction from challenging binocular footage under uncontrolled lighting. In an experimental evaluation, the strong capabilities of our method become explicit: We achieve detailed and spatio-temporally coherent results for expressive facial motion in both indoor and outdoor scenes -- even from low quality input images recorded with a hand-held consumer stereo camera. We believe that our approach is the first to capture facial performances of such high quality from a single stereo rig and we demonstrate that it brings facial performance capture out of the studio, into the wild, and within the reach of everybody.
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