We present a method that generates expressive talking heads from a single facial image with audio as the only input. In contrast to previous approaches that attempt to learn direct mappings from audio to raw pixels or points for creating talking faces, our method first disentangles the content and speaker information in the input audio signal. The audio content robustly controls the motion of lips and nearby facial regions, while the speaker information determines the specifics of facial expressions and the rest of the talking head dynamics. Another key component of our method is the prediction of facial landmarks reflecting speaker-aware dynamics. Based on this intermediate representation, our method is able to synthesize photorealistic videos of entire talking heads with full range of motion and also animate artistic paintings, sketches, 2D cartoon characters, Japanese mangas, stylized caricatures in a single unified framework. We present extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation of our method, in addition to user studies, demonstrating generated talking heads of significantly higher quality compared to prior state-of-the-art.
AIOZ；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；VinAI Research（VinAI研究院）
Audio-driven talking head animation is a challenging research topic with many real-world applications. Recent works have focused on creating photo-realistic 2D animation, while learning different talking or singing styles remains an open problem. In this paper, we present a new method to generate talking head animation with learnable style references. Given a set of style reference frames, our framework can reconstruct 2D talking head animation based on a single input image and an audio stream. Our method first produces facial landmarks motion from the audio stream and constructs the intermedi…
Learning Disentangled Speech- and Expression-Driven Blendshapes for 3D Talking Face Animation
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Huadian (Beijing) Co-Generation Co., Ltd.（华电（北京）热电有限公司）
To the best of our knowledge, we first present a live system that generates personalized photorealistic talking-head animation only driven by audio signals at over 30 fps. Our system contains three stages. The first stage is a deep neural network that extracts deep audio features along with a manifold projection to project the features to the target person's speech space. In the second stage, we learn facial dynamics and motions from the projected audio features. The predicted motions include head poses and upper body motions, where the former is generated by an autoregressive probabilistic mo…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Talking face synthesis has been widely studied in either appearance-based or warping-based methods. Previous works mostly utilize single face image as a source, and generate novel facial animations by merging other person's facial features. However, some facial regions like eyes or teeth, which may be hidden in the source image, can not be synthesized faithfully and stably. In this paper, We present a landmark driven two-stream network to generate faithful talking facial animation, in which more facial details are created, preserved and transferred from multiple source images instead of a sing…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
Impressive progress has been made in audio-driven 3D facial animation recently, but synthesizing 3D talking-head with rich emotion is still unsolved. This is due to the lack of 3D generative models and available 3D emotional dataset with synchronized audios. To address this, we introduce 3D-TalkEmo, a deep neural network that generates 3D talking head animation with various emotions. We also create a large 3D dataset with synchronized audios and videos, rich corpus, as well as various emotion states of different persons with the sophisticated 3D face reconstruction methods. In the emotion gene…
PTalker: Personalized Speech-Driven 3D Talking Head Animation via Style Disentanglement and Modality Alignment
College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering（计算机科学与电子工程学院）；Hunan University（湖南大学）；School of Electronic Information（电子信息学院）；Central South University（中南大学）
Exploiting Temporal Audio-Visual Correlation Embedding for Audio-Driven One-Shot Talking Head Animation
School of Information Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学信息工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Real-world talking faces often accompany with natural head movement. However, most existing talking face video generation methods only consider facial animation with fixed head pose. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a deep neural network model that takes an audio signal A of a source person and a very short video V of a target person as input, and outputs a synthesized high-quality talking face video with personalized head pose (making use of the visual information in V), expression and lip synchronization (by considering both A and V). The most challenging issue in our work…
Generating talking head videos through a face image and a piece of speech audio still contains many challenges. ie, unnatural head movement, distorted expression, and identity modification. We argue that these issues are mainly because of learning from the coupled 2D motion fields. On the other hand, explicitly using 3D information also suffers problems of stiff expression and incoherent video. We present SadTalker, which generates 3D motion coefficients (head pose, expression) of the 3DMM from audio and implicitly modulates a novel 3D-aware face render for talking head generation. To learn th…
Monocular and Generalizable Gaussian Talking Head Animation
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Pazhou Laboratory（琶洲实验室）；Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
SyncAnimation: A Real-Time End-to-End Framework for Audio-Driven Human Pose and Talking Head Animation
AiShiWeiLai AI Research（AiShiWeiLai AI研究院）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Learn2Talk: 3D Talking Face Learns from 2D Talking Face
School of Informatics, Xiamen University（厦门大学信息学院）；China Mobile (Hangzhou) Information Technology Co., Ltd.（中国移动（杭州）信息技术有限公司）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Speech-driven facial animation is useful for a variety of applications such as telepresence, chatbots, etc. The necessary attributes of having a realistic face animation are 1) audio-visual synchronization (2) identity preservation of the target individual (3) plausible mouth movements (4) presence of natural eye blinks. The existing methods mostly address the audio-visual lip synchronization, and few recent works have addressed the synthesis of natural eye blinks for overall video realism. In this paper, we propose a method for identity-preserving realistic facial animation from speech. We fi…
Netease Fuxi AI Lab（网易伏羲人工智能实验室）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Audio-driven one-shot talking face generation methods are usually trained on video resources of various persons. However, their created videos often suffer unnatural mouth shapes and asynchronous lips because those methods struggle to learn a consistent speech style from different speakers. We observe that it would be much easier to learn a consistent speech style from a specific speaker, which leads to authentic mouth movements. Hence, we propose a novel one-shot talking face generation framework by exploring consistent correlations between audio and visual motions from a specific speaker and…
Netease Fuxi AI Lab（网易伏羲人工智能实验室）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
In this paper, we propose a novel text-based talking-head video generation framework that synthesizes high-fidelity facial expressions and head motions in accordance with contextual sentiments as well as speech rhythm and pauses. To be specific, our framework consists of a speaker-independent stage and a speaker-specific stage. In the speaker-independent stage, we design three parallel networks to generate animation parameters of the mouth, upper face, and head from texts, separately. In the speaker-specific stage, we present a 3D face model guided attention network to synthesize videos tailor…
PC-Talk: Precise Facial Animation Control for Audio-Driven Talking Face Generation
MAIS, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所MAIS部）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Psyche AI.INC（Psyche AI公司）；HKUST（香港科技大学）；CAIR, HKISI, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算智能研究所）；SCSE, FIE, M.U.S.T（M.U.S.T的SCSE、FIE部门）
TalkingEyes: Pluralistic Speech-Driven 3D Eye Gaze Animation
School of Informatics, Xiamen University（厦门大学信息学院）；China Mobile (Hangzhou) Information Technology Co., Ltd.（中国移动（杭州）信息技术有限公司）；Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）
University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；OPPO US Research Center（OPPO美国研究中心）
When people deliver a speech, they naturally move heads, and this rhythmic head motion conveys prosodic information. However, generating a lip-synced video while moving head naturally is challenging. While remarkably successful, existing works either generate still talkingface videos or rely on landmark/video frames as sparse/dense mapping guidance to generate head movements, which leads to unrealistic or uncontrollable video synthesis. To overcome the limitations, we propose a 3D-aware generative network along with a hybrid embedding module and a non-linear composition module. Through modelin…
DualTalk: Dual-Speaker Interaction for 3D Talking Head Conversations
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Ant Group（蚂蚁集团）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing（北京未来区块链与隐私计算创新中心）
Versatile Multimodal Controls for Expressive Talking Human Animation
National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Ant Group（人机混合增强智能国家级实验室，西安交通大学，蚂蚁集团）；National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Xi'an Jiaotong University（人机混合增强智能国家级实验室，西安交通大学）；University at Buffalo（布法罗大学）
LSF-Animation: Label-Free Speech-Driven Facial Animation via Implicit Feature Representation
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Zhongguancun Academy（中关村学院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Nanchang Hangkong University（南昌航空大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）
Most of the existing audio-driven 3D facial animation methods suffered from the lack of detailed facial expression and head pose, resulting in unsatisfactory experience of human-robot interaction. In this paper, a novel pose-controllable 3D facial animation synthesis method is proposed by utilizing hierarchical audio-vertex attention. To synthesize real and detailed expression, a hierarchical decomposition strategy is proposed to encode the audio signal into both a global latent feature and a local vertex-wise control feature. Then the local and global audio features combined with vertex spati…
In this work, we present a novel audio-visual dataset for active speaker detection in the wild. A speaker is considered active when his or her face is visible and the voice is audible simultaneously. Although active speaker detection is a crucial pre-processing step for many audio-visual tasks, there is no existing dataset of natural human speech to evaluate the performance of active speaker detection. We therefore curate the Active Speakers in the Wild (ASW) dataset which contains videos and co-occurring speech segments with dense speech activity labels. Videos and timestamps of audible segme…
The goal of this work is to reconstruct speech from a silent talking face video. Recent studies have shown impressive performance on synthesizing speech from silent talking face videos. However, they have not explicitly considered on varying identity characteristics of different speakers, which place a challenge in the video-to-speech synthesis, and this becomes more critical in unseen-speaker settings. Our approach is to separate the speech content and the visage-style from a given silent talking face video. By guiding the model to independently focus on modeling the two representations, we c…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Samsung AI Centre（三星人工智能中心）
Speech-driven facial animation is the process that automatically synthesizes talking characters based on speech signals. The majority of work in this domain creates a mapping from audio features to visual features. This approach often requires post-processing using computer graphics techniques to produce realistic albeit subject dependent results. We present an end-to-end system that generates videos of a talking head, using only a still image of a person and an audio clip containing speech, without relying on handcrafted intermediate features. Our method generates videos which have (a) lip mo…
