In this work, we consider the task of generating highlyrealistic images of a given face with a redirected gaze. We treat this problem as a specific instance of conditional image generation and suggest a new deep architecture that can handle this task very well as revealed by numerical comparison with prior art and a user study. Our deep architecture performs coarse-to-fine warping with an additional intensity correction of individual pixels. All these operations are performed in a feed-forward manner, and the parameters associated with different operations are learned jointly in the end-to-end fashion. After learning, the resulting neural network can synthesize images with manipulated gaze, while the redirection angle can be selected arbitrarily from a certain range and provided as an input to the network.
We propose a general approach to the gaze redirection problem in images that utilizes machine learning. The idea is to learn to re-synthesize images by training on pairs of images with known disparities between gaze directions. We show that such learning-based re-synthesis can achieve convincing gaze redirection based on monocular input, and that the learned systems generalize well to people and imaging conditions unseen during training. We describe and compare three instantiations of our idea. The first system is based on efficient decision forest predictors and redirects the gaze by a fixed angle in real-time (on a single CPU), being particularly suitable for the videoconferencing gaze correction. The second system is based on a deep architecture and allows gaze redirection by a range of angles. The second system achieves higher photorealism, while being several times slower. The third system is based on real-time decision forests at test time, while using the supervision from a "teacher" deep network during training. The third system approaches the quality of a teacher network in our experiments, and thus provides a highly realistic real-time monocular solution to the gaze correction problem. We present in-depth assessment and comparisons of the proposed systems based on quantitative measurements and a user study.
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