LightHeadEd: Relightable & Editable Head Avatars from a Smartphone

Creating photorealistic, animatable, and relightable 3D head avatars traditionally requires expensive Lightstage with multiple calibrated cameras, making it inaccessible for widespread adoption. To bridge this gap, we present a novel, cost-effective approach for creating high-quality relightable head avatars using only a smartphone equipped with polaroid filters. Our approach involves simultaneously capturing cross-polarized and parallel-polarized video streams in a dark room with a single point-light source, separating the skin's diffuse and specular components during dynamic facial performances. We introduce a hybrid representation that embeds 2D Gaussians in the UV space of a parametric head model, facilitating efficient real-time rendering while preserving high-fidelity geometric details. Our learning-based neural analysis-by-synthesis pipeline decouples pose and expression-dependent geometrical offsets from appearance, decomposing the surface into albedo, normal, and specular UV texture maps, along with the environment maps. We collect a unique dataset of various subjects performing diverse facial expressions and head movements.

@article{manu2025_2504.09671,
  title={ LightHeadEd: Relightable & Editable Head Avatars from a Smartphone },
  author={ Pranav Manu and Astitva Srivastava and Amit Raj and Varun Jampani and Avinash Sharma and P.J. Narayanan },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.09671},
  year={ 2025 }
}