[Submitted on 22 Sep 2026]
Title:$\unicode{x1F493}$Heartian: Physiology-Aware Relightable Gaussian Head Avatar
View a PDF of the paper titled $\unicode{x1F493}$Heartian: Physiology-Aware Relightable Gaussian Head Avatar, by Xiaoyue Fan and 3 other authors
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Abstract:Gaussian head avatars typically model intrinsic facial appearance as temporally static, omitting subtle cardiac-induced skin-color variation. We propose $\unicode{x1F493}$Heartian, a physiology-aware modulation framework that learns cardiac-cycle-dependent per-frame albedo modulation of facial skin-region Gaussians within a relightable head avatar to encode remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) signals. Using synchronized contact PPG supervision, $\unicode{x1F493}$Heartian models the prescribed cardiac waveform as the sum of two Gaussian functions and learns per-frame spatial residuals via a lightweight MLP. Across 152 stationary recordings from UBFC-rPPG, PURE, and MMPD, attribute-space recovery of the supplied signal achieves a pooled recording-level heart-rate MAE of 0.29 bpm and MAPE of 0.38%. The signals remain detectable after rendering by benchmark rPPG methods, with the best tested configuration - a motion-augmented TS-CAN decoder pretrained on UBFC-rPPG - recovering heart rate from the rendered MMPD avatars at 0.97 bpm MAE and 1.21% MAPE. Meanwhile, $\unicode{x1F493}$Heartian maintains reconstruction quality comparable to the baseline, with negligible average PSNR degradation of 0.005 dB. Overall, our work embeds recoverable rPPG signals as controllable material attributes to subject-specific Gaussian head avatars while retaining the reconstruction quality.
Comments: 4 pages of manuscript and 2 pages of supplementary material; SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 Technical Communications
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Graphics (cs.GR)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.28539 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2609.28539v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.28539
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1145/3829339.3847838
DOI(s) linking to related resources
Submission history
From: Xiaoyue Fan [view email] [v1] Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:25:20 UTC (1,939 KB)
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