Towards High-Fidelity Face Self-Occlusion Recovery via Multi-View Residual-Based GAN Inversion

Face self-occlusions are inevitable due to the 3D nature of the human face and the loss of information in the projection process from 3D to 2D images. While recovering face self-occlusions based on 3D face reconstruction, e.g., 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) and its variants provides an effective solution, most of the existing methods show apparent limitations in expressing high-fidelity, natural, and diverse facial details. To overcome these limitations, we propose in this paper a new generative adversarial network (MvInvert) for natural face self-occlusion recovery without using paired image-texture data. We design a coarse-to-fine generator for photorealistic texture generation. A coarse texture is computed by inpainting the invisible areas in the photorealistic but incomplete texture sampled directly from the 2D image using the unrealistic but complete statistical texture from 3DMM. Then, we design a multi-view Residual-based GAN Inversion, which re-renders and refines multi-view 2D images, which are used for extracting multiple high-fidelity textures. Finally, these high-fidelity textures are fused based on their visibility maps via Poisson blending. To perform adversarial learning to assure the quality of the recovered texture, we design a discriminator consisting of two heads, i.e., one for global and local discrimination between the recovered texture and a small set of real textures in UV space, and the other for discrimination between the input image and the re-rendered 2D face images via pixel-wise, identity, and adversarial losses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in face self-occlusion recovery under unconstrained scenarios.