GaussianAvatars: Photorealistic Head Avatars with Rigged 3D Gaussians

We introduce GaussianAvatars11Project page: https://shenhanqian.github.io/gaussian-avatars, a new method to create photorealistic head avatars that are fully controllable in terms of expression, pose, and viewpoint. The core idea is a dynamic 3D representation based on 3D Gaussian splats that are rigged to a parametric morphable face model. This combination facilitates photorealistic rendering while allowing for precise animation control via the underlying parametric model, e.g., through expression transfer from a driving sequence or by manually changing the morphable model parameters. We parameterize each splat by a local coordinate frame of a triangle and optimize for explicit dis-placement offset to obtain…