mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A Morphable Face Albedo Model

arXiv 2004.02711 ↗First posted 6 Apr 2020cs.CV cs.GRcited by 54

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Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we bring together two divergent strands of research: photometric face capture and statistical 3D face appearance modelling. We propose a novel lightstage capture and processing pipeline for acquiring ear-to-ear, truly intrinsic diffuse and specular albedo maps that fully factor out the effects of illumination, camera and geometry. Using this pipeline, we capture a dataset of 50 scans and combine them with the only existing publicly available albedo dataset (3DRFE) of 23 scans. This allows us to build the first morphable face albedo model. We believe this is the first statistical analysis of the variability of facial specular albedo maps. This model can be used as a plug in replacement for the texture model of the Basel Face Model (BFM) or FLAME and we make the model publicly available. We ensure careful spectral calibration such that our model is built in a linear sRGB space, suitable for inverse rendering of images taken by typical cameras. We demonstrate our model in a state of the art analysis-by-synthesis 3DMM fitting pipeline, are the first to integrate specular map estimation and outperform the BFM in albedo reconstruction.

Key facts. Cited by 54 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2020.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 9; 2022: 11; 2023: 11; 2024: 12; 2025: 8; 2026: 3.

54 papers.

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  1. 2021AvatarMe++: Facial Shape and BRDF Inference with Photorealistic Rendering-Aware GANscited by 49
  2. 2021Towards High Fidelity Monocular Face Reconstruction with Rich Reflectance using Self-supervised Learning and Ray Tracingcited by 48
  3. 2024URAvatar: Universal Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatarscited by 43
  4. 2023FitMe: Deep Photorealistic 3D Morphable Model Avatarscited by 38
  5. 2021Practical Face Reconstruction via Differentiable Ray Tracingcited by 35
  6. 2023Relightify: Relightable 3D Faces from a Single Image via Diffusion Modelscited by 34
  7. 2021Fast-GANFIT: Generative Adversarial Network for High Fidelity 3D Face Reconstructioncited by 33
  8. 2022REALY: Rethinking the Evaluation of 3D Face Reconstructioncited by 32
  9. 2022Towards Racially Unbiased Skin Tone Estimation via Scene Disambiguationcited by 32
  10. 2022Facial Geometric Detail Recovery via Implicit Representationcited by 27
  11. 2022Memories are One-to-Many Mapping Alleviators in Talking Face Generationcited by 22
  12. 2023HiFace: High-Fidelity 3D Face Reconstruction by Learning Static and Dynamic Detailscited by 22
38 more
  1. 2023Learning a 3D Morphable Face Reflectance Model from Low-cost Datacited by 20
  2. 2021Cross-Domain and Disentangled Face Manipulation with 3D Guidancecited by 17
  3. 2022Video-driven Neural Physically-based Facial Asset for Productioncited by 17
  4. 2022S2F2: Self-Supervised High Fidelity Face Reconstruction from Monocular Imagecited by 17
  5. 2025Arc2Avatar: Generating Expressive 3D Avatars from a Single Image via ID Guidancecited by 16
  6. 2021Prior-Guided Multi-View 3D Head Reconstructioncited by 14
  7. 2022SIRA: Relightable Avatars from a Single Imagecited by 12
  8. 20223DMM-RF: Convolutional Radiance Fields for 3D Face Modelingcited by 10
  9. 2022BareSkinNet: De-makeup and De-lighting via 3D Face Reconstructioncited by 10
  10. 2023High-Quality Facial Geometry and Appearance Capture at Homecited by 9
  11. 2023Makeup Extraction of 3D Representation via Illumination-Aware Image Decompositioncited by 8
  12. 2022PhoMoH: Implicit Photorealistic 3D Models of Human Headscited by 7
  13. 2024Makeup Prior Models for 3D Facial Makeup Estimation and Applicationscited by 7
  14. 2025FreeUV: Ground-Truth-Free Realistic Facial UV Texture Recovery via Cross-Assembly Inference Strategycited by 7
  15. 2025FastAvatar: Instant 3D Gaussian Splatting for Faces from Single Unconstrained Posescited by 7
  16. 2021FreeStyleGAN: Free-view Editable Portrait Rendering with the Camera Manifoldcited by 6
  17. 2024VGG-Tex: A Vivid Geometry-Guided Facial Texture Estimation Model for High Fidelity Monocular 3D Face Reconstructioncited by 6
  18. 2023FitDiff: Robust monocular 3D facial shape and reflectance estimation using Diffusion Modelscited by 5
  19. 2024Monocular Identity-Conditioned Facial Reflectance Reconstructioncited by 5
  20. 2024ID-to-3D: Expressive ID-guided 3D Heads via Score Distillation Samplingcited by 5
  21. 2025Facial Appearance Capture at Home with Patch-Level Reflectance Priorcited by 5
  22. 2021Implicit Neural Deformation for Sparse-View Face Reconstructioncited by 4
  23. 2023InstantAvatar: Efficient 3D Head Reconstruction via Surface Renderingcited by 4
  24. 2023SFDM: Robust Decomposition of Geometry and Reflectance for Realistic Face Rendering from Sparse-view Imagescited by 4
  25. 2025TeGA: Texture Space Gaussian Avatars for High-Resolution Dynamic Head Modelingcited by 4
  26. 2022Approximating Intersections and Differences Between Linear Statistical Shape Models Using Markov Chain Monte Carlocited by 2
  27. 2024High-Fidelity Facial Albedo Estimation via Texture Quantizationcited by 2
  28. 2024Monocular Facial Appearance Capture in the Wildcited by 2
  29. 2025High-Quality Facial Albedo Generation for 3D Face Reconstruction from a Single Image using a Coarse-to-Fine Approachcited by 2
  30. 2021Sphere Face Model:A 3D Morphable Model with Hypersphere Manifold Latent Spacecited by 1
  31. 2024Democratizing the Creation of Animatable Facial Avatarscited by 1
  32. 20243D Face Modeling via Weakly-supervised Disentanglement Network joint Identity-consistency Priorcited by 1
  33. 2024Learning to Decouple the Lights for 3D Face Texture Modelingcited by 1
  34. 2025WildCap: Facial Albedo Capture in the Wild via Hybrid Inverse Renderingcited by 1
  35. 2026Monocular Avatar Reconstruction via Cascaded Diffusion Priors and UV-Space Differentiable Shadingcited by 1
  36. 2023Face Inverse Rendering via Hierarchical Decouplingcited by 0
  37. 2023Accurate Gaze Estimation using an Active-gaze Morphable Modelcited by 0
  38. 2024Inpainting Normal Maps for Lightstage datacited by 0

50 most cited of 54 All 54 (JSON)