# Structure-aware Editable Morphable Model for 3D Facial Detail Animation and Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09019 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09019/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01865/) (2019)
- [Which Training Methods for GANs do actually Converge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04406/) (2018)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (2020)
- [3D Morphable Face Models -- Past, Present and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01815/) (2019)
- [Generating 3D faces using Convolutional Mesh Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10267/) (2018)
- [Neural Unsigned Distance Fields for Implicit Function Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13938/) (2020)
- [DatasetGAN: Efficient Labeled Data Factory with Minimal Human Effort](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06490/) (2021)
- [On the "steerability" of generative adversarial networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07171/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01723/) (2019)
- [Swapping Autoencoder for Deep Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00653/) (2020)
- [FaceScape: a Large-scale High Quality 3D Face Dataset and Detailed Riggable 3D Face Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13989/) (2020)
- [Learning to Regress 3D Face Shape and Expression from an Image without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06817/) (2019)
- [Semantic Segmentation with Generative Models: Semi-Supervised Learning and Strong Out-of-Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05833/) (2021)
- [Morphable Face Models - An Open Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08398/) (2017)
- [SfSNet: Learning Shape, Reflectance and Illuminance of Faces in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01261/) (2017)
- [i3DMM: Deep Implicit 3D Morphable Model of Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14143/) (2020)
- [Learning Formation of Physically-Based Face Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03458/) (2020)
- [Towards High-fidelity Nonlinear 3D Face Morphable Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04933/) (2019)
- [Neural 3D Morphable Models: Spiral Convolutional Networks for 3D Shape Representation Learning and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02876/) (2019)
- [Learning Detailed Face Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05053/) (2016)
- [Unrestricted Facial Geometry Reconstruction Using Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10131/) (2017)
- [Enjoy Your Editing: Controllable GANs for Image Editing via Latent Space Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01187/) (2021)
- [Disentangled Representation Learning for 3D Face Shape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09887/) (2019)
- [Photo-Realistic Facial Details Synthesis from Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10873/) (2019)
- [MeshGAN: Non-linear 3D Morphable Models of Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10384/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [HiFace: High-Fidelity 3D Face Reconstruction by Learning Static and Dynamic Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11225/) (2023)
- [Deep Sketch-Based 3D Modeling: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03287/) (2026)
- [High-Quality Facial Albedo Generation for 3D Face Reconstruction from a Single Image using a Coarse-to-Fine Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13233/) (2025)
- [Facial Surgery Preview Based on the Orthognathic Treatment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11045/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Morphable models are essential for the statistical modeling of 3D faces. Previous works on morphable models mostly focus on large-scale facial geometry but ignore facial details. This paper augments morphable models in representing facial details by learning a Structure-aware Editable Morphable Model (SEMM). SEMM introduces a detail structure representation based on the distance field of wrinkle lines, jointly modeled with detail displacements to establish better correspondences and enable intuitive manipulation of wrinkle structure. Besides, SEMM introduces two transformation modules to translate expression blendshape weights and age values into changes in latent space, allowing effective semantic detail editing while maintaining identity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model compactly represents facial details, outperforms previous methods in expression animation qualitatively and quantitatively, and achieves effective age editing and wrinkle line editing of facial details. Code and model are available at https://github.com/gerwang/facial-detail-manipulation.