Alexander Groshev , Anastasiia Iashchenko , Pavel Paramonov , Denis Dimitrov , Andrey Kuznetsov
{"title":"GHOST 2.0: Generative high-fidelity one shot transfer of heads","authors":"Alexander Groshev , Anastasiia Iashchenko , Pavel Paramonov , Denis Dimitrov , Andrey Kuznetsov","doi":"10.1016/j.aiopen.2026.02.003","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>While the task of face swapping has recently gained attention in the research community, a related problem of head swapping remains largely unexplored. In addition to skin color transfer, head swap poses extra challenges, such as the need to preserve structural information of the whole head during synthesis and inpaint gaps between swapped head and background. In this paper, we address these concerns with GHOST 2.0, which consists of two problem-specific modules. First, we introduce enhanced Aligner model for head reenactment, which preserves identity information at multiple scales and is robust to extreme pose variations. Secondly, we use a Blender module that seamlessly integrates the reenacted head into the target background by transferring skin color and inpainting mismatched regions. Both modules outperform the baselines on the corresponding tasks, allowing to achieve state-of-the-art results in head swapping. We also tackle complex cases, such as large difference in hair styles of source and target.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":100068,"journal":{"name":"AI Open","volume":"7 ","pages":"Pages 45-61"},"PeriodicalIF":14.8000,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"AI Open","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666651026000021","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2026/2/14 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
While the task of face swapping has recently gained attention in the research community, a related problem of head swapping remains largely unexplored. In addition to skin color transfer, head swap poses extra challenges, such as the need to preserve structural information of the whole head during synthesis and inpaint gaps between swapped head and background. In this paper, we address these concerns with GHOST 2.0, which consists of two problem-specific modules. First, we introduce enhanced Aligner model for head reenactment, which preserves identity information at multiple scales and is robust to extreme pose variations. Secondly, we use a Blender module that seamlessly integrates the reenacted head into the target background by transferring skin color and inpainting mismatched regions. Both modules outperform the baselines on the corresponding tasks, allowing to achieve state-of-the-art results in head swapping. We also tackle complex cases, such as large difference in hair styles of source and target.