# MeGA: Hybrid Mesh-Gaussian Head Avatar for High-Fidelity Rendering and Head Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19026 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19026/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular 4D Facial Avatar Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03065/) (2020)
- [Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01954/) (2021)
- [GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02069/) (2023)
- [I M Avatar: Implicit Morphable Head Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07471/) (2021)
- [HeadNeRF: A Real-time NeRF-based Parametric Head Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05637/) (2021)
- [Neural Head Avatars from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01554/) (2021)
- [3DGS-Avatar: Animatable Avatars via Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09228/) (2023)
- [NeRSemble: Multi-view Radiance Field Reconstruction of Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03027/) (2023)
- [PointAvatar: Deformable Point-based Head Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08377/) (2022)
- [Deep Appearance Models for Face Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00362/) (2018)
- [Instant Volumetric Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12499/) (2022)
- [NeuMesh: Learning Disentangled Neural Mesh-based Implicit Field for Geometry and Texture Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11911/) (2022)
- [Reconstructing Personalized Semantic Facial NeRF Models From Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06108/) (2022)
- [Pixel Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04638/) (2021)
- [Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03704/) (2023)
- [FlashAvatar: High-fidelity Head Avatar with Efficient Gaussian Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02214/) (2023)
- [MonoGaussianAvatar: Monocular Gaussian Point-based Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04558/) (2023)
- [Learning Compositional Radiance Fields of Dynamic Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09955/) (2020)
- [AvatarMAV: Fast 3D Head Avatar Reconstruction Using Motion-Aware Neural Voxels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13206/) (2022)
- [HeadGaS: Real-Time Animatable Head Avatars via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02902/) (2023)
- [GaussianHair: Hair Modeling and Rendering with Light-aware Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10483/) (2024)
- [High-Fidelity 3D Digital Human Head Creation from RGB-D Selfies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05562/) (2020)
- [GaussianHead: High-fidelity Head Avatars with Learnable Gaussian Derivation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01632/) (2023)
- [Learning Personalized High Quality Volumetric Head Avatars from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01436/) (2023)
- [SA-GS: Scale-Adaptive Gaussian Splatting for Training-Free Anti-Aliasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19615/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Generalizable and Animatable Gaussian Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07971/) (2024)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Obstacle Avoidance for Robot Movement in Warehouse Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14972/) (2024)
- [Research on reinforcement learning based warehouse robot navigation algorithm in complex warehouse layout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06128/) (2024)
- [HairCUP: Hair Compositional Universal Prior for 3D Gaussian Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19481/) (2025)
- [FastAvatar: Instant 3D Gaussian Splatting for Faces from Single Unconstrained Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18389/) (2025)
- [Generating Editable Head Avatars with 3D Gaussian GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19149/) (2024)
- [SVG-Head: Hybrid Surface-Volumetric Gaussians for High-Fidelity Head Reconstruction and Real-Time Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09597/) (2025)
- [FastGHA: Generalized Few-Shot 3D Gaussian Head Avatars with Real-Time Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13837/) (2026)
- [GeoAvatar: Adaptive Geometrical Gaussian Splatting for 3D Head Avatar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18155/) (2025)
- [SRM-Hair: Single Image Head Mesh Reconstruction via 3D Morphable Hair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06154/) (2025)
- [TexAvatars : Hybrid Texel-3D Representations for Stable Rigging of Photorealistic Gaussian Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21099/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Avatar Fingerprinting: A Multi-Generator Photorealistic Talking-Head Public Database and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26934/) (2026)
- [PhysHead: Simulation-Ready Gaussian Head Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06467/) (2026)
- [LightHeadEd: Relightable & Editable Head Avatars from a Smartphone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09671/) (2025)
- [AvatarBack: Back-Head Generation for Complete 3D Avatars from Front-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20623/) (2025)
- [Durian: Dual Reference Image-Guided Portrait Animation with Attribute Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04434/) (2025)
- [From Volume Rendering to 3D Gaussian Splatting: Theory and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18101/) (2025)
- [GTAvatar: Bridging Gaussian Splatting and Texture Mapping for Relightable and Editable Gaussian Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09162/) (2025)
- [LegacyAvatars: Volumetric Face Avatars For Traditional Graphics Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12285/) (2026)
- [OmniFaceRig: Fully Automatic Inner-Mouth-Aware Face Rigging Across Diverse 3D Character Topologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08043/) (2026)
- [HarmoView: Harmonizing Multi-View Constraints for Identity-Consistent Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10839/) (2026)
- [HairLRM: Strand-based Hair Modeling via Large Reconstruction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15238/) (2026)
- [Monocular Avatar Reconstruction via Cascaded Diffusion Priors and UV-Space Differentiable Shading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28144/) (2026)
- [Gaussian Pixel Codec Avatars: A Hybrid Representation for Efficient Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15711/) (2025)
- [Using Gaussian Splats to Create High-Fidelity Facial Geometry and Texture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16397/) (2025)
- [CaricatureGS: Exaggerating 3D Gaussian Splatting Faces With Gaussian Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03319/) (2026)
- [ProgressiveAvatars: Progressive Animatable 3D Gaussian Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16447/) (2026)
- [FHAvatar: Fast and High-Fidelity Reconstruction of Face-and-Hair Composable 3D Head Avatar from Few Casual Captures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23345/) (2026)
- [EfficientMonoHair: Fast Strand-Level Reconstruction from Monocular Video via Multi-View Direction Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05794/) (2026)
- [FaceParts: Segmentation and Editing of Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13853/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Creating high-fidelity head avatars from multi-view videos is a core issue for many AR/VR applications. However, existing methods usually struggle to obtain high-quality renderings for all different head components simultaneously since they use one single representation to model components with drastically different characteristics (e.g., skin vs. hair). In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Mesh-Gaussian Head Avatar (MeGA) that models different head components with more suitable representations. Specifically, we select an enhanced FLAME mesh as our facial representation and predict a UV displacement map to provide per-vertex offsets for improved personalized geometric details. To achieve photorealistic renderings, we obtain facial colors using deferred neural rendering and disentangle neural textures into three meaningful parts. For hair modeling, we first build a static canonical hair using 3D Gaussian Splatting. A rigid transformation and an MLP-based deformation field are further applied to handle complex dynamic expressions. Combined with our occlusion-aware blending, MeGA generates higher-fidelity renderings for the whole head and naturally supports more downstream tasks. Experiments on the NeRSemble dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our designs, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods and supporting various editing functionalities, including hairstyle alteration and texture editing.