Chen Cao

Chen Cao (曹晨)

Research Scientist @ Reality Labs

Contact: zju.caochen at gmail.com

About me

I am a Research Scientist at Meta Codec Avatar Team. I was a Senior Research Scientist at Snap. I obtained the PhD from Zhejiang University(ZJU), supervised by Prof. Kun Zhou. I was a student member of Graphics and Parallel Systems Lab. I received my B. Eng. degree from College of Computer Science & Technology, Zhejiang University in 2010. My research concentrates on computer graphics.

[News] I am looking for Research Scientist and Research Engineer to join my team working on photo-realistic avatar generation, please shoot me an email if you are interested

[News] I am looking for PhD students as intern in my team, please shoot me an email if you are interested.

News

[2024.06.09] My first SIGGRAPH paper "3D Shape Regression for Real-time Facial Animation" wins the SIGGRAPH 2024 Test-of-Time Award

[2022.06.02] Our paper "Authentic Volumetric Avatars from a Phone Scan" is accepted by SIGGRAPH 2022

[2021.05.01] Our paper "Real-time 3D Neural Facial Animation from Binocular Video" is accepted by SIGGRAPH 2021

[2021. 03.01] Our paper "High-fidelity Face Tracking for AR/VR via Deep Lighting Adaptation" is accepted by CVPR 2021

[2019.07.08] Have my first day at Facebook.

[2019.05.09] Our paper "Efficient Neural Networks for Real-time Motion Style Transfer" is accepted by SCA 2019

[2018.08.11] Our paper "Stabilized Real-time Face Tracking via a Learned Dynamic Rigidity Prior" is conditionally accepted by Siggraph Asia 2018

[2016.06.20] Have my first day at Snapchat.

[2016.04.25] Our paper "Real-Time Facial Animation with Image-based Dynamic Avatars" is conditionally accepted by Siggraph 2016.

[2016.03.31] I won the Excellent Graduate Student honor of Zhejiang Province.

[2015.10.20] I will move to USA in 2016, and will become a Research Scientist in Snapchat.

[2015.10.15] I won the 2015 Chu Kochen Scholarship, the highest scholarship of ZJU, 12 awardees from all 5000+ graduate students.

Research

My research interest is computer graphics, especially for facial animation:

Photorealistic 3D face expression database for virtual computing
Real-time facial animation with single camera
Facial image/video editing

Education

2/2012 ~ 6/2016: Ph.D candidate, College of Computer Science & Technology, Zhejiang University
9/2010 ~ 2/2012: M.Sc candidate (Transferred to PhD), College of Computer Science & Technology, Zhejiang University
9/2006 ~ 6/2010: B.Eng., Chu Kochen Hornors Program, College of Computer Science & Technology, Zhejiang University

Honor & Awards

2024 SIGGRAPH Test-of-Time Award [Website]
2016 Excellent Graduate Student of Zhejiang Province
2015 Chu Kochen Scholarship (The highest scholarship of ZJU, 12/5000+ graduate students)
2010 Chiang Chen Scholarship [Website]
2013 Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship (10 awardees in Asia) [Website]
2013 National Ph.D. Scholarships of P.R.China [Website](Chinese)

Publications [Google Scholar]

Universal Facial Encoding of Codec Avatars from VR Headsets

Shaojie Bai, Te-Li Wang, Chenghui Li, Akshay Venkatesh, Tomas Simon, Chen Cao, Gabriel Schwartz, Jason Saragih, Yaser Sheikh, and Shih-En Wei

SIGGRAPH 2024

URHand: Universal Relightable Hands

Zhaoxi Chen, Gyeongsik Moon, Kaiwen Guo, Chen Cao, Stanislav Pidhorskyi, Tomas Simon, Rohan Joshi, Yuan Dong, Yichen Xu, Bernardo Pires, He Wen, Lucas Evans, Bo Peng, Julia Buffalini, Autumn Trimble, Kevyn McPhail, Melissa Schoeller, Shoou-I Yu, Javier Romero, Michael Zollhöfer, Yaser Sheikh, Ziwei Liu*, Shunsuke Saito*

CVPR 2024 (Oral) [Project]

Authentic Volumetric Avatars From a Phone Scan

Chen Cao, Tomas Simon, Jin Kyu Kim, Gabe Schwartz, Michael Zollhoefer, Shunsuke Saito, Stephen Lombardi, Shih-en Wei, Danielle Belko, Shoou-i Yu, Yaser Sheikh, Jason Saragih

ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2022) [Pdf][Video]