Facial Microscopic Structures Synthesis from a Single Unconstrained Image
Youyang Du, Lu Wang, and Beibei Wang
In Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH Conference Papers ’25, , 2025
Obtaining 3D faces with microscopic structures from a single unconstrained image is challenging. The complexities of wrinkles and pores at a microscopic level, coupled with the blurriness of the input image, raise the difficulty. However, the distribution of wrinkles and pores tends to follow a specialized pattern, which can provide a strong prior for synthesizing them. Therefore, a key to microstructure synthesis is a parametric wrinkles and pore model with controllable semantic parameters. Additionally, ensuring differentiability is essential for enabling optimization through gradient descent methods. To this end, we propose a novel framework designed to reconstruct facial micro-wrinkles and pores from naturally captured images efficiently. At the core of our framework is a differentiable representation of wrinkles and pores via a graph neural network (GNN), which can simulate the complex interactions between adjacent wrinkles by multiple graph convolutions. Furthermore, to overcome the problem of inconsistency between the blurry input and clear wrinkles during optimization, we proposed a Direction Distribution Similarity that ensures that the wrinkle-directional features remain consistent. Consequently, our framework can synthesize facial micro-structures from a blurry skin image patch, which is cropped from a natural-captured facial image, in around an average of 2 seconds. Our framework can seamlessly integrate with existing macroscopic facial detail reconstruction methods to enhance their detailed appearance. We showcase this capability on several works, including DECA, HRN, and FaceScape.
