AHS: Adaptive Head Synthesis via Synthetic Data Augmentations
Abstract
Recent digital media advancements have created increasing demands for sophisticated portrait manipulation techniques, particularly head swapping—where one image's head is seamlessly integrated onto another's body. Current approaches predominantly rely on face-centered cropped data with limited view angles, significantly restricting their real-world applicability. These methods struggle with diverse head expressions, varying hairstyles, and natural blending beyond facial regions. To address these limitations, we propose Adaptive Head Synthesis (AHS), which effectively handles full upper-body images with varied head poses and expressions. AHS incorporates a novel head reenacted synthetic data augmentation strategy to overcome self-supervised training constraints, enhancing generalization across diverse facial expressions and orientations without requiring paired training data. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance in challenging real-world scenarios, producing visually coherent results that preserve both identity and expression fidelity across various head orientations and hairstyles. Notably, our method shows exceptional robustness in maintaining facial identity while drastic expression changes and faithfully preserving accessories while significant head pose variations.