3D head animation has seen major quality and runtime improvements over the last few years, particularly empowered by the advances in differentiable rendering and neural radiance fields. Real-time rendering is a highly desirable goal for real-world applications. We propose HeadGaS, the first model to use 3D Gaussian Splats (3DGS) for 3D head reconstruction and animation. In this paper we introduce a hybrid model that extends the explicit representation from 3DGS with a base of learnable latent features, which can be linearly blended with low-dimensional parameters from parametric head models to obtain expression-dependent final color and opacity values. We demonstrate that HeadGaS delivers state-of-the-art results in real-time inference frame rates, which surpasses baselines by up to ~2dB, while accelerating rendering speed by over x10.
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