PR3D: Precise and realistic 3D face reconstruction from a single image

Abstract Reconstructing the three‐dimensional (3D) shape and texture of the face from a single image is a significant and challenging task in computer vision and graphics. In recent years, learning‐based reconstruction methods have exhibited outstanding performance, but their effectiveness is severely constrained by the scarcity of available training data with 3D annotations. To address this issue, we present the PR3D (Precise and Realistic 3D face reconstruction) method, which consists of high‐precision shape reconstruction based on semi‐supervised learning and high‐fidelity texture reconstruction based on StyleGAN2. In shape reconstruction, we use in‐the‐wild face images and 3D annotated datasets to train the auxiliary encoder and the identity encoder, encoding the input image into parameters of FLAME (a parametric 3D face model). Simultaneously, a novel semi‐supervised hybrid landmark loss is designed to more effectively learn from in‐the‐wild face images and 3D annotated datasets. Furthermore, to meet the real‐time requirements in practical applications, a lightweight shape reconstruction model called fast‐PR3D is distilled through teacher–student learning. In texture reconstruction, we propose a texture extraction method based on face reenactment in StyleGAN2 style space, extracting texture from the source and reenacted face images to constitute a facial texture map. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the state‐of‐the‐art performance of our method.