  We present a method for synthesizing a frontal, neutral-expression image of a
person's face given an input face photograph. This is achieved by learning to
generate facial landmarks and textures from features extracted from a
facial-recognition network. Unlike previous approaches, our encoding feature
vector is largely invariant to lighting, pose, and facial expression.
Exploiting this invariance, we train our decoder network using only frontal,
neutral-expression photographs. Since these photographs are well aligned, we
can decompose them into a sparse set of landmark points and aligned texture
maps. The decoder then predicts landmarks and textures independently and
combines them using a differentiable image warping operation. The resulting
images can be used for a number of applications, such as analyzing facial
attributes, exposure and white balance adjustment, or creating a 3-D avatar.
