CVPR 2026

2nd Workshop on
Photorealistic 3D Head Avatars
(P3HA)


June 3rd 2026, 8am - 1pm

Colorado Convention Center, Denver CO, Room 107

Workshop Program

TBA

Workshop Challenges

The workshop holds a competition on the newly introduced NeRSemble benchmark for 3D Head avatars. The goal is to find the current best method for dynamic novel view synthesis on heads and monocular FLAME-driven avatar reconstruction.

Single-view 3D Face Reconstruction

Given a single image of a person, the task is to produce a 3D mesh representing the person's head. There are 2 tracks:
  • Posed Reconstruction: The mesh needs to resemble the person and show the exact same facial expression.
  • Neutral Reconstruction: The mesh needs to resemble the person but have a completely neutral expression.
The challenge is conducted on 391 images from 20 different persons of various ethnicities, ages, and genders. The meshes for each image can be provided with FLAME topology or with arbitrary topology, in which case additional 7 landmarks are required for alignment.

Monocular FLAME Avatar Challenge (v2)

Given several frontal videos of a person's head with corresponding tracked meshes from FLAME, the task is to re-animate the person with unseen FLAME expression codes and then render from both seen (blue) and unseen (orange) camera viewpoints. This requires reconstructing an animatable 3D head representation (=3D head avatar). The challenge is conducted on recordings from 5 different individuals. For each individual, 18 short facial performance sequences are provided for training while the remaining 4 sequences are hold-out. For the hold-out sequences, only the tracked FLAME meshes and the camera poses are known.
The updated v2 of the benchmark task provides improved FLAME tracking to even better measure the reconstruction performance of avatar creation methods.

Competition Prizes

The winner of each workshop challenge will receive:
  • a dedicated 15-minute oral presentation in the workshop to showcase your method
  • an RTX 5080 GPU sponsored by NVIDIA*

*cannot be gifted to non-academics or persons residing outside of North America and Europe due to export restrictions imposed on NVIDIA by the US government

Competition Timeline

Date
Challenge begin 07th April 2026
Challenge submission deadline 26th May 2026
Winner announcement 28th May 2026

Workshop Organizers

Tobias Kirschstein Tobias Kirschstein Technical University of Munich
Simon Giebenhain Simon Giebenhain Technical University of Munich
Tianye Li Tianye Li NVIDIA
Koki Nagano Koki Nagano NVIDIA
Justus Thies Justus Thies Technical University of Darmstadt
Matthias Nießner Matthias Nießner Technical University of Munich

Workshop Sponsors

NVIDIA We thank NVIDIA for sponsoring the prices for the workshop challenge winners.

Please contact Tobias Kirschstein for questions.