AI model creates 3D avatars from a person’s picture

What if all it took to create a realistic digital avatar of a person was a single image? In a paper accepted to the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2020, researchers at Imperial College London and FaceSoft.io, a startup leveraging AI and machine learning for facial analysis, describe AvatarMe, a technique that’s able to reconstruct photorealistic 3D busts from “in-the-wild” photos. They claim it outperforms existing systems by a “significant margin” and generates authentic, 4K-by-6K-resolution 3D faces from low-resolution targets with detailed reflections.

Rendering 3D faces has countless applications in domains from videoconferencing to virtual reality, but though geometry can be inferred without AI, much more information is required in order to render a face in arbitrary scenes.