content type paperpublished May 2026
Large-Scale High-Quality 3D Gaussian Head Reconstruction from Multi-View Captures
AuthorsEvangelos Ntavelis, Sean Wu†, Mohamad Shahbazi, Fabio Maninchedda, Dmitry Kostiaev, Artem Sevastopolsky, Vittorio Megaro, Trevor Phillips, Alejandro Blumentals, Shridhar Ravikumar, Mehak Gupta, Reinhard Knothe, Jeronimo Bayer, Matthias Vestner, Simon Schaefer, Thomas Etterlin, Christian Zimmermann, Mathias Deschler, Peter Kaufmann, Stefan Brugger, Sebastian Martin, Brian Amberg, Tom Runia
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We propose HeadsUp, a scalable feed-forward method for reconstructing high-quality 3D Gaussian heads from large-scale multi-camera setups. Our method employs an efficient encoder-decoder architecture that compresses input views into a compact latent representation. This latent representation is then decoded into a set of UV-parameterized 3D Gaussians anchored to a neutral head template. This UV representation decouples the number of 3D Gaussians from the number and resolution of input images, enabling training with many high-resolution input views. We train and evaluate our model on an internal dataset with more than 10,000 subjects, which is an order of magnitude larger than existing multi-view human head datasets. HeadsUp achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and generalizes to novel identities without test-time optimization. We extensively analyze the scaling behavior of our model across identities, views, and model capacity, revealing practical insights for quality-compute trade-offs. Finally, we highlight the strength of our latent space by showcasing two downstream applications: generating novel 3D identities and animating the 3D heads with expression blendshapes.
† ETH Zurich
** Work done while at Apple
Figure 1: Overview of HeadsUp. Our method reconstructs high-fidelity 3D Gaussian heads from multi-view images. Given a set of input views, our model utilizes a transformer-based encoder and a 3D Gaussian decoder to predict UV-parameterized 3D Gaussians for both the foreground and background. The model is trained end-to-end using a combination of photometric and perceptual supervision.
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