  Following the remarkable success of diffusion models on image generation,
recent works have also demonstrated their impressive ability to address a
number of inverse problems in an unsupervised way, by properly constraining the
sampling process based on a conditioning input. Motivated by this, in this
paper, we present the first approach to use diffusion models as a prior for
highly accurate 3D facial BRDF reconstruction from a single image. We start by
leveraging a high-quality UV dataset of facial reflectance (diffuse and
specular albedo and normals), which we render under varying illumination
settings to simulate natural RGB textures and, then, train an unconditional
diffusion model on concatenated pairs of rendered textures and reflectance
components. At test time, we fit a 3D morphable model to the given image and
unwrap the face in a partial UV texture. By sampling from the diffusion model,
while retaining the observed texture part intact, the model inpaints not only
the self-occluded areas but also the unknown reflectance components, in a
single sequence of denoising steps. In contrast to existing methods, we
directly acquire the observed texture from the input image, thus, resulting in
more faithful and consistent reflectance estimation. Through a series of
qualitative and quantitative comparisons, we demonstrate superior performance
in both texture completion as well as reflectance reconstruction tasks.
