Facial Appearance Capture at Home with Patch-Level Reflectance Prior
On the map: Diffusion models → Inverse problems and image restoration
Abstract (arXiv)
Existing facial appearance capture methods can reconstruct plausible facial reflectance from smartphone-recorded videos. However, the reconstruction quality is still far behind the ones based on studio recordings. This paper fills the gap by developing a novel daily-used solution with a co-located smartphone and flashlight video capture setting in a dim room. To enhance the quality, our key observation is to solve facial reflectance maps within the data distribution of studio-scanned ones. Specifically, we first learn a diffusion prior over the Light Stage scans and then steer it to produce the reflectance map that best matches the captured images. We propose to train the diffusion prior at the patch level to improve generalization ability and training stability, as current Light Stage datasets are in ultra-high resolution but limited in data size. Tailored to this prior, we propose a patch-level posterior sampling technique to sample seamless full-resolution reflectance maps from this patch-level diffusion model. Experiments demonstrate our method closes the quality gap between low-cost and studio recordings by a large margin, opening the door for everyday users to clone themselves to the digital world. Our code will be released at https://github.com/yxuhan/DoRA.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 27 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2025.
Builds on
27 of 60 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2023Beyond First-Order Tweedie: Solving Inverse Problems using Latent Diffusion1 Dec
- 2022Diffusion Posterior Sampling for General Noisy Inverse Problems29 Sep
Other references · 25
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
- 2018The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metriccited by 11,029
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,655
- 2016Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networkscited by 4,510
- 2019Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGANcited by 3,580
- 2021NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstructioncited by 1,701
- 2021Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfacescited by 990
- 2023MultiDiffusion: Fusing Diffusion Paths for Controlled Image Generationcited by 529
- 2020Modular Primitives for High-Performance Differentiable Renderingcited by 439
- 2023ReconFusion: 3D Reconstruction with Diffusion Priorscited by 317
- 2020Learning Formation of Physically-Based Face Attributescited by 94
- 2020AvatarMe: Realistically Renderable 3D Facial Reconstruction "in-the-wild"cited by 91
13 more
- 2023DreamFace: Progressive Generation of Animatable 3D Faces under Text Guidancecited by 79
- 2024IntrinsicAnything: Learning Diffusion Priors for Inverse Rendering Under Unknown Illuminationcited by 67
- 2023Mixture of Diffusers for scene composition and high resolution image generationcited by 56
- 2020A Morphable Face Albedo Modelcited by 54
- 2021AvatarMe++: Facial Shape and BRDF Inference with Photorealistic Rendering-Aware GANscited by 49
- 2020High-Fidelity 3D Digital Human Head Creation from RGB-D Selfiescited by 47
- 2019Photo-Realistic Facial Details Synthesis from Single Imagecited by 40
- 2023FLARE: Fast Learning of Animatable and Relightable Mesh Avatarscited by 39
- 2023Relightify: Relightable 3D Faces from a Single Image via Diffusion Modelscited by 34
- 2022High-Res Facial Appearance Capture from Polarized Smartphone Imagescited by 21
- 2023MoSAR: Monocular Semi-Supervised Model for Avatar Reconstruction using Differentiable Shadingcited by 18
- 2023High-Quality Facial Geometry and Appearance Capture at Homecited by 9
- 2023HACK: Learning a Parametric Head and Neck Model for High-fidelity Animationcited by 7
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 3.
5 papers.
- 2025VGGTFace: Topologically Consistent Facial Geometry Reconstruction in the Wildcited by 4
- 2025WildCap: Facial Albedo Capture in the Wild via Hybrid Inverse Renderingcited by 1
- 2026RelightAnyone: A Generalized Relightable 3D Gaussian Head Modelcited by 0
- 2026Learning a Delighting Prior for Facial Appearance Capture in the Wildcited by 0
- 2026TOPOS: High-Fidelity and Efficient Industry-Grade 3D Head Generationcited by 0
- 2026TOPOS: High-Fidelity and Efficient Industry-Grade 3D Head Generation14 May 2026
- 2026Learning a Delighting Prior for Facial Appearance Capture in the Wild7 May 2026
- 2026RelightAnyone: A Generalized Relightable 3D Gaussian Head Model6 Jan 2026
- 2025WildCap: Facial Albedo Capture in the Wild via Hybrid Inverse Rendering12 Dec 2025
- 2025VGGTFace: Topologically Consistent Facial Geometry Reconstruction in the Wild25 Nov 2025
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026Pixel Cube: Diffusion-based Portrait Video Relighting Through Realistic Lighting Reproduction
- 2026DVFace: Spatio-Temporal Dual-Prior Diffusion for Video Face Restoration
- 2023Diffusion Reflectance Map: Single-Image Stochastic Inverse Rendering of Illumination and Reflectance
- 2026MakeupMirror: Improving Facial Attribute Preservation in Diffusion Models for Makeup Transfer
- 2025Lux Post Facto: Learning Portrait Performance Relighting with Conditional Video Diffusion and a Hybrid Dataset
- 2024DifFRelight: Diffusion-Based Facial Performance Relighting
- 2026ViDS: Video Diffusion Shader using 3D Face Tracking
- 2024AuthFace: Towards Authentic Blind Face Restoration with Face-oriented Generative Diffusion Prior