# A Morphable Face Albedo Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.02711 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02711/

## Key facts

- Cited by 54 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [AvatarMe++: Facial Shape and BRDF Inference with Photorealistic Rendering-Aware GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05957/) (2021)
- [Towards High Fidelity Monocular Face Reconstruction with Rich Reflectance using Self-supervised Learning and Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15432/) (2021)
- [URAvatar: Universal Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24223/) (2024)
- [FitMe: Deep Photorealistic 3D Morphable Model Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09641/) (2023)
- [Practical Face Reconstruction via Differentiable Ray Tracing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05356/) (2021)
- [Relightify: Relightable 3D Faces from a Single Image via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06077/) (2023)
- [Fast-GANFIT: Generative Adversarial Network for High Fidelity 3D Face Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07474/) (2021)
- [REALY: Rethinking the Evaluation of 3D Face Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09729/) (2022)
- [Towards Racially Unbiased Skin Tone Estimation via Scene Disambiguation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03962/) (2022)
- [Facial Geometric Detail Recovery via Implicit Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09692/) (2022)
- [Memories are One-to-Many Mapping Alleviators in Talking Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05005/) (2022)
- [HiFace: High-Fidelity 3D Face Reconstruction by Learning Static and Dynamic Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11225/) (2023)
- [Learning a 3D Morphable Face Reflectance Model from Low-cost Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11686/) (2023)
- [Cross-Domain and Disentangled Face Manipulation with 3D Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11228/) (2021)
- [Video-driven Neural Physically-based Facial Asset for Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05592/) (2022)
- [S2F2: Self-Supervised High Fidelity Face Reconstruction from Monocular Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07732/) (2022)
- [Arc2Avatar: Generating Expressive 3D Avatars from a Single Image via ID Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05379/) (2025)
- [Prior-Guided Multi-View 3D Head Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04277/) (2021)
- [SIRA: Relightable Avatars from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03027/) (2022)
- [3DMM-RF: Convolutional Radiance Fields for 3D Face Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07366/) (2022)
- [BareSkinNet: De-makeup and De-lighting via 3D Face Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09029/) (2022)
- [High-Quality Facial Geometry and Appearance Capture at Home](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03442/) (2023)
- [Makeup Extraction of 3D Representation via Illumination-Aware Image Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13279/) (2023)
- [PhoMoH: Implicit Photorealistic 3D Models of Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07275/) (2022)
- [Makeup Prior Models for 3D Facial Makeup Estimation and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17761/) (2024)
- [FreeUV: Ground-Truth-Free Realistic Facial UV Texture Recovery via Cross-Assembly Inference Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17197/) (2025)
- [FastAvatar: Instant 3D Gaussian Splatting for Faces from Single Unconstrained Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18389/) (2025)
- [FreeStyleGAN: Free-view Editable Portrait Rendering with the Camera Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09378/) (2021)
- [VGG-Tex: A Vivid Geometry-Guided Facial Texture Estimation Model for High Fidelity Monocular 3D Face Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09740/) (2024)
- [FitDiff: Robust monocular 3D facial shape and reflectance estimation using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04465/) (2023)

## 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.