Fast 3D face reconstruction from a single image combining attention mechanism and graph convolutional network

In recent years, researchers have made significant contributions to 3D face reconstruction with the rapid development of deep learning. However, learning-based methods often suffer from time and memory consumption. Simply removing network layers hardly solves the problem. In this study, we propose a solution that achieves fast and robust 3D face reconstruction from a single image without the need for accurate 3D data for training. In terms of increasing speed, we use a lightweight network as a facial feature extractor. As a result, our method reduces the reliance on graphics processing units, allowing fast inference on central processing units alone. To maintain robustness, we combine an attention mechanism and a graph convolutional network in parameter regression to concentrate on facial details. We experiment with different combinations of three loss functions to obtain the best results. In comparative experiments, we evaluate the performance of the proposed method and state-of-the-art methods on 3D face reconstruction and sparse face alignment, respectively. Experiments on a variety of datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.