# SAFA: Structure Aware Face Animation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.04928 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04928/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [VoxCeleb2: Deep Speaker Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05622/) (2018)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [Generative Image Inpainting with Contextual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07892/) (2018)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [One-Shot Free-View Neural Talking-Head Synthesis for Video Conferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.15126/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08233/) (2019)
- [StyleRig: Rigging StyleGAN for 3D Control over Portrait Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00121/) (2020)
- [Deep Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11714/) (2018)
- [Motion Representations for Articulated Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11280/) (2021)
- [GANs Trained by a Two Time-Scale Update Rule Converge to a Local Nash Equilibrium](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08500/) (2017)
- [Animating Arbitrary Objects via Deep Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08861/) (2018)
- [Few-shot Video-to-Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12713/) (2019)
- [X2Face: A network for controlling face generation by using images, audio, and pose codes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10550/) (2018)
- [Fast Bi-layer Neural Synthesis of One-Shot Realistic Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10174/) (2020)
- [MarioNETte: Few-shot Face Reenactment Preserving Identity of Unseen Targets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08139/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Implicit Identity Representation Conditioned Memory Compensation Network for Talking Head video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09906/) (2023)
- [Face Animation with an Attribute-Guided Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03199/) (2023)
- [CVTHead: One-shot Controllable Head Avatar with Vertex-feature Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06443/) (2023)
- [FNeVR: Neural Volume Rendering for Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10340/) (2022)
- [DaGAN++: Depth-Aware Generative Adversarial Network for Talking Head Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06225/) (2023)
- [Unified Physical-Digital Face Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17699/) (2024)
- [From Pixels to Portraits: A Comprehensive Survey of Talking Head Generation Techniques and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16041/) (2023)
- [Joint Physical-Digital Facial Attack Detection Via Simulating Spoofing Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08450/) (2024)
- [Learning Motion Refinement for Unsupervised Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13912/) (2023)
- [Advancing Talking Head Generation: A Comprehensive Survey of Multi-Modal Methodologies, Datasets, Evaluation Metrics, and Loss Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02900/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Taxonomy and Analysis of Talking Head Synthesis: Techniques for Portrait Generation, Driving Mechanisms, and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10553/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Unified Face Attack Detection via Hierarchical Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13327/) (2025)
- [MaskRenderer: 3D-Infused Multi-Mask Realistic Face Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05095/) (2023)
- [Unified Physical-Digital Attack Detection Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06211/) (2024)
- [RID-TWIN: An end-to-end pipeline for automatic face de-identification in videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10058/) (2024)
- [G3FA: Geometry-guided GAN for Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13049/) (2024)
- [Now You See Me, Now You Don't: A Unified Framework for Expression Consistent Anonymization in Talking Head Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11635/) (2026)
- [One-Shot Feed-Forward 360circ Animatable Avatar via Inpainted UV-Space Gaussian Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12770/) (2026)
- [Motion Manipulation via Unsupervised Keypoint Positioning in Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04302/) (2026)
- [PartNerFace: Part-based Neural Radiance Fields for Animatable Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13918/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent success of generative adversarial networks (GAN) has made great progress on the face animation task. However, the complex scene structure of a face image still makes it a challenge to generate videos with face poses significantly deviating from the source image. On one hand, without knowing the facial geometric structure, generated face images might be improperly distorted. On the other hand, some area of the generated image might be occluded in the source image, which makes it difficult for GAN to generate realistic appearance. To address these problems, we propose a structure aware face animation (SAFA) method which constructs specific geometric structures to model different components of a face image. Following the well recognized motion based face animation technique, we use a 3D morphable model (3DMM) to model the face, multiple affine transforms to model the other foreground components like hair and beard, and an identity transform to model the background. The 3DMM geometric embedding not only helps generate realistic structure for the driving scene, but also contributes to better perception of occluded area in the generated image. Besides, we further propose to exploit the widely studied inpainting technique to faithfully recover the occluded image area. Both quantitative and qualitative experiment results have shown the superiority of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/Qiulin-W/SAFA.