Bridging the Gap: Studio-like Avatar Creation from a Monocular Phone Capture

Creating photorealistic avatars for individuals traditionally involves extensive capture sessions with complex and expensive studio devices like the LightStage system. While recent strides in neural representations have enabled the generation of photorealistic and animatable 3D avatars from quick phone scans, they have baked-in capture-time lighting, lack facial details and have missing regions in areas such as the back of the ears. Thus, they lag in quality compared to studio-captured avatars. In this paper, we propose a method to bridge this gap by generating studio-like illuminated texture maps from short, monocular phone captures. We do this by parameterizing the phone texture maps using the W+ space of a StyleGAN2, enabling near-perfect reconstruction. Then, we finetune a StyleGAN2 by sampling in the W+ parameterized space using a very small set of studio-captured textures as an adversarial training signal. To further enhance the realism and accuracy of facial details, we super-resolve the output of the StyleGAN2 using a diffusion model conditioned on image gradients of the phone-captured texture map. Once trained, our method excels at producing studio-like facial texture maps from casual monocular smartphone videos. Demonstrating its capabilities, we showcase the generation of photorealistic, uniformly lit, complete avatars from monocular phone captures.