GHARP: Real-Time Gaussian Head Animation from Large-Scale Reconstruction Prior

Apple researchers present GHARP, a method that animates 3D human heads in real time from a few input images plus a driving expression signal, splitting the task into an offline identity stage and a lightweight runtime animation stage. A body alignment network removes ambiguity from body pose and clothing, and GHARP reaches state-of-the-art quality on the Ava-256 benchmark while running up to 13× faster on an A100 GPU with 8× fewer Gaussians.