MarioNETte: with only a few pictures a human behind a webcam can “drive” the picture to copy facial expressions realistically

When there is a mismatch between the target identity and the driver identity, face reenactment suffers severe degradation in the quality of the result, especially in a few-shot setting. The identity preservation problem, where the model loses the detailed information of the target leading to a defective output, is the most common failure mode. The problem has several potential sources such as the identity of the driver leaking due to the identity mismatch, or dealing with unseen large poses. To overcome such problems, we introduce components that address the mentioned problem: image attention block, target feature alignment, and landmark transformer. Through attending and warping the relevant features, the proposed architecture, called MarioNETte, produces high-quality reenactments of unseen identities in a few-shot setting. In addition, the landmark transformer dramatically alleviates the identity preservation problem by isolating the expression geometry through landmark disentanglement. Comprehensive experiments are performed to verify that the proposed framework can generate highly realistic faces, outperforming all other baselines, even under a significant mismatch of facial characteristics between the target and the driver.

Source: MarioNETte: Few-shot Face Reenactment Preserving Identity of Unseen Targets

Arvix paper: MarioNETte: Few-shot Face Reenactment Preserving Identity of Unseen Targets

Bose customers beg for firmware ceasefire after headphones fall victim to another crap update which kills noise cancelling

Owners of Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones are still trying to get the company to either fix or roll back a firmware update that removed noise-cancelling functions from their over-ear gear.

The problems date back to July and some owners seem to have managed to get Bose to exchange their cans for the company’s shiny new 700 headphones.

We were contacted by a reader who was first given a set of version II headphones when his V1 set were borked. When the updated firmware borked them as well, he declined the offer of a replacement set and was given a pair of 700s. Firmware version 4.5.2 was fingered as the main culprit.

Like all Bose gear, the cans don’t come cheap – they’ll set you back £259.95 to be precise, or £349.95 for a pair of limited edition white 700s.

Pissed-off punters have filled a deafening 182 pages of Bose’s support forums with complaints.

One has even set up a Change.org petition to beg for a pause on firmware updates until a fix is found.

The main complaint is that Bose seems to be deaf to the problem and the easiest solution – to roll everyone back to the previous firmware and restore noise cancelling.

As of Thursday, Bose was claiming that new firmware is coming soon to solve the problem, a long five-month wait for angry customers.

We’ve contacted Bose’s UK PR again but don’t expect to hear back. The company kept very quiet when firmware updates stopped their TV soundbars making any sound.

We asked if the replacement policy was open to all customers worldwide – our contact is in Europe.

One poor punter on the forum is from Brazil and pointed out it was a long trip to his nearest Bose service centre – in Mexico.

Source: Bose customers beg for firmware ceasefire after headphones fall victim to another crap update • The Register