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Fast face swapping with high-fidelity lightweight generator assisted by online knowledge distillation

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Abstract

Advanced face swapping approaches have achieved high-fidelity results. However, the success of most methods hinges on heavy parameters and high-computational costs. With the popularity of real-time face swapping, these factors have become obstacles restricting their swap speed and application. To overcome these challenges, we propose a high-fidelity lightweight generator (HFLG) for face swapping, which is a compressed version of the existing network Simple Swap and consists of its 1/4 channels. Moreover, to stabilize the learning of HFLG, we introduce feature map-based online knowledge distillation into our training process and improve the teacher–student architecture. Specifically, we first enhance our teacher generator to provide more efficient guidance. It minimizes the loss of details on the lower face. In addition, a new identity-irrelevant similarity loss is proposed to improve the preservation of non-facial regions in the teacher generator results. Furthermore, HFLG uses an extended identity injection module to inject identity more efficiently. It gradually learns face swapping by imitating the feature maps and outputs of the teacher generator online. Extensive experiments on faces in the wild demonstrate that our method achieves comparable results with other methods while having fewer parameters, lower computations, and faster inference speed. The code is available at https://github.com/EifelTing/HFLFS.

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Data availability

The data are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Three datasets are used in our experiments, including VGGFace2, FaceForensics++, and CelebA-HQ. The VGGFace2 dataset is selected from https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/vgg_face2/, the FaceForensics++ dataset is selected from https://github.com/ondyari/FaceForensics, and the CelebA-HQ dataset is selected from https://github.com/switchablenorms/CelebAMask-HQ.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Anhui Natural Science Foundation of China under grant number 2308085MF218, in part by the Academic Funding Project for Top Talents in University Disciplines under grant number gxbjZD2021050, in part by the Anhui Provincial Higher Education Institutions Scientific Research Project under grant number 2022AH040113, and in part by the Anhui University of Science and Technology 2023 Graduate Innovation Fund Project under grant number 2023cx2136.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan, China

    Gaoming Yang, Yifeng Ding & Xianjin Fang

  2. School of Mathematics, Physics and Computing, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia

    Ji Zhang

  3. College of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, China

    Yan Chu

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Yifeng Ding performed the experiments and analyzed the data. Yifeng Ding wrote the original manuscript. All authors reviewed and edited the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yifeng Ding.

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The research protocol did not require ethical review or approval as it did not involve human participants, animals, or sensitive data. All data used in this study were obtained from publicly available sources and were properly cited and acknowledged. No private or personally identifiable information was used or accessed during this research.

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Yang, G., Ding, Y., Fang, X. et al. Fast face swapping with high-fidelity lightweight generator assisted by online knowledge distillation. Vis Comput 41, 1251–1271 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-024-03414-2

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