SfSNet: Learning Shape, Reflectance and Illuminance of Faces in the Wild

We present SfSNet, an end-to-end learning framework for producing an accurate decomposition of an unconstrained human face image into shape, reflectance and illuminance. SfSNet is designed to reflect a physical lambertian rendering model. SfSNet learns from a mixture of labeled synthetic and unlabeled real-world images. This allows the network to capture low-frequency variations from synthetic and high-frequency details from real images through the photometric reconstruction loss. SfSNet consists of a new decomposition architecture with residual blocks that learns a complete separation of albedo and normal. This is used along with the original image to predict lighting. SfSNet produces significantly better quantitative and qualitative results than state-of-the-art methods for inverse rendering and independent normal and illumination estimation. We also introduce a companion network, SfSMesh, that utilizes normals estimated by SfSNet to reconstruct a 3D face mesh. We demonstrate that SfSMesh produces face meshes with greater accuracy than state-of-the-art methods on real-world images.