# 3DFaceGAN: Adversarial Nets for 3D Face Representation, Generation, and Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.00307 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00307/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [FFHQ-UV: Normalized Facial UV-Texture Dataset for 3D Face Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13874/) (2022)
- [FitMe: Deep Photorealistic 3D Morphable Model Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09641/) (2023)
- [CharacterFactory: Sampling Consistent Characters with GANs for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15677/) (2024)
- [Sparse to Dense Dynamic 3D Facial Expression Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07463/) (2021)
- [HS-Diffusion: Semantic-Mixing Diffusion for Head Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06458/) (2022)
- [Towards High-Fidelity Text-Guided 3D Face Generation and Manipulation Using only Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16758/) (2023)
- [3DMM-RF: Convolutional Radiance Fields for 3D Face Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07366/) (2022)
- [FaceTuneGAN: Face Autoencoder for Convolutional Expression Transfer Using Neural Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00532/) (2021)
- [Controllable 3D Generative Adversarial Face Model via Disentangling Shape and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14263/) (2022)
- [Generating Multiple 4D Expression Transitions by Learning Face Landmark Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00050/) (2022)
- [3D Generative Model Latent Disentanglement via Local Eigenprojection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12798/) (2023)
- [3D human tongue reconstruction from single "in-the-wild" images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12302/) (2021)
- [FitDiff: Robust monocular 3D facial shape and reflectance estimation using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04465/) (2023)
- [ID-to-3D: Expressive ID-guided 3D Heads via Score Distillation Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16570/) (2024)
- [Unpaired Multi-domain Attribute Translation of 3D Facial Shapes with a Square and Symmetric Geometric Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13245/) (2023)
- [GTA: Advancing Image-to-3D World Generation via Geometry Then Appearance Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12957/) (2026)
- [Generation and Detection of Sign Language Deepfakes - A Linguistic and Visual Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01438/) (2024)
- [SINGA-Easy: An Easy-to-Use Framework for MultiModal Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02572/) (2021)
- [VisualTextRank: Unsupervised Graph-based Content Extraction for Automating Ad Text to Image Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02725/) (2021)
- [Text is NOT Enough: Integrating Visual Impressions into Open-domain Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05778/) (2021)
- [Discovering Personalized Semantics for Soft Attributes in Recommender Systems using Concept Activation Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02830/) (2022)
- [Reinforced MOOCs Concept Recommendation in Heterogeneous Information Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11011/) (2022)
- [Explanation-Guided Fairness Testing through Genetic Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08335/) (2022)
- [Using Graph Neural Networks for Program Termination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14648/) (2022)
- [Tribe or Not? Critical Inspection of Group Differences Using TribalGram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09664/) (2023)
- [MUNCH: Modelling Unique 'N Controllable Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02753/) (2023)
- [Sampling Strategies for Mitigating Bias in Face Synthesis Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11320/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Over the past few years, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have garnered increased interest among researchers in Computer Vision, with applications including, but not limited to, image generation, translation, imputation, and super-resolution. Nevertheless, no GAN-based method has been proposed in the literature that can successfully represent, generate or translate 3D facial shapes (meshes). This can be primarily attributed to two facts, namely that (a) publicly available 3D face databases are scarce as well as limited in terms of sample size and variability (e.g., few subjects, little diversity in race and gender), and (b) mesh convolutions for deep networks present several challenges that are not entirely tackled in the literature, leading to operator approximations and model instability, often failing to preserve high-frequency components of the distribution. As a result, linear methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) have been mainly utilized towards 3D shape analysis, despite being unable to capture non-linearities and high frequency details of the 3D face - such as eyelid and lip variations. In this work, we present 3DFaceGAN, the first GAN tailored towards modeling the distribution of 3D facial surfaces, while retaining the high frequency details of 3D face shapes. We conduct an extensive series of both qualitative and quantitative experiments, where the merits of 3DFaceGAN are clearly demonstrated against other, state-of-the-art methods in tasks such as 3D shape representation, generation, and translation.