Realistic Game Avatars Auto-Creation from Single Images via Three-pathway Network

We propose a novel single image 3D face reconstruction method for realistic in-game avatar auto-creation. Although some existing 3D face reconstruction methods have been able to generate good geometry, there are still some shortages in texture generation, especially diffuse prediction, which limits its application in games or other scenarios. The main problems of these methods include: the details in the photo are not accurately restored, the produced diffuse is over smoothed, or the occlusion and lighting are not correctly removed, and so on. Although some methods collect high-quality 3D face data for neural networks to learn to generate realistic 3D faces, collecting 3D face data is known expensive. To address the above problems, we propose to utilize data from three sources, including single face images, manually inpainted diffuse maps paired with face portraits, and multiple photos of single IDs generated by a pretrained network. To make full use of these data, we propose a three-pathway network architecture that takes face images as input, produces diffuse maps, normal maps, as well as pose and light coefficients. The network parameters are optimized by comparing the rendered results with the input images, along with some other objective functions.