SelfSwapper: Self-Supervised Face Swapping via Shape Agnostic Masked AutoEncoder

Face swapping has gained significant attention for its varied applications. Most previous face swapping approaches have relied on the seesaw game training scheme, also known as the target-oriented approach. However, this often leads to instability in model training and results in undesired samples with blended identities due to the target identity leakage problem. Source-oriented methods achieve more stable training with self-reconstruction objective but often fail to accurately reflect target image's skin color and illumination. This paper introduces the Shape Agnostic Masked AutoEncoder (SAMAE) training scheme, a novel self-supervised approach that combines the strengths of both target-oriented and source-oriented approaches. Our training scheme addresses the limitations of traditional training methods by circumventing the conventional seesaw game and introducing clear ground truth through its self-reconstruction training regime. Our model effectively mitigates identity leakage and reflects target albedo and illumination through learned disentangled identity and non-identity features. Additionally, we closely tackle the shape misalignment and volume discrepancy problems with new techniques, including perforation confusion and random mesh scaling. SAMAE establishes a new state-of-the-art, surpassing other baseline methods, preserving both identity and non-identity attributes without sacrificing on either aspect.