PFFNet: A point cloud based method for 3D face flow estimation☆

In recent years, the research on 3D facial flow has received more attention, and it is of great significance for related research on 3D faces. Point cloud based 3D face flow estimation is inherently challenging due to non-rigid and large-scale motion. In this paper, we propose a novel method called PFFNet for estimating 3D face flow in a coarse-to-fine network. Specifically, an adaptive sampling module is proposed to learn sampling points, and an effective channel-wise feature extraction module is incorporated to learn facial priors from the point clouds, jointly. Additionally, to accommodate large-scale motion, we also introduce a normal vector angle upsampling module to enhance local semantic consistency, and a context-aware cost volume that learns the correlation between the two point clouds with context information. Experiments conducted on the FaceScape dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art scene flow methods by a significant margin.