Recent advances in facial expression synthesis have shown promising results using diverse expression representations including facial action units. Facial action units for an elaborate facial expression synthesis need to be intuitively represented for human comprehension, not a numeric categorization of facial action units. To address this issue, we utilize human-friendly approach: use of natural language where language helps human grasp conceptual contexts. In this paper, therefore, we propose a new facial expression synthesis model from language-based facial expression description. Our method can synthesize the facial image with detailed expressions. In addition, effectively embedding language features on facial features, our method can control individual word to handle each part of facial movement. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the natural language.
College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University（天津大学智能与计算学部）
Facial expression synthesis or editing has recently received increasing attention in the field of affective computing and facial expression modeling. However, most existing facial expression synthesis works are limited in paired training data, low resolution, identity information damaging, and so on. To address those limitations, this paper introduces a novel Action Unit (AU) level facial expression synthesis method called Local Attentive Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (LAC-GAN) based on face action units annotations. Given desired AU labels, LAC-GAN utilizes local AU regional rule…
We present a single-image 3D face synthesis technique that can handle challenging facial expressions while recovering fine geometric details. Our technique employs expression analysis for proxy face geometry generation and combines supervised and unsupervised learning for facial detail synthesis. On proxy generation, we conduct emotion prediction to determine a new expression-informed proxy. On detail synthesis, we present a Deep Facial Detail Net (DFDN) based on Conditional Generative Adversarial Net (CGAN) that employs both geometry and appearance loss functions. For geometry, we capture 366…
National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别国家重点实验室）；Center for Research on Intelligent Perception and Computing, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所智能感知与计算研究中心）；Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, CAS（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Facial expression synthesis has drawn much attention in the field of computer graphics and pattern recognition. It has been widely used in face animation and recognition. However, it is still challenging due to the high-level semantic presence of large and non-linear face geometry variations. This paper proposes a Geometry-Guided Generative Adversarial Network (G2-GAN) for photo-realistic and identity-preserving facial expression synthesis. We employ facial geometry (fiducial points) as a controllable condition to guide facial texture synthesis with specific expression. A pair of generative ad…
Multi-task learning is an effective learning strategy for deep-learning-based facial expression recognition tasks. However, most existing methods take into limited consideration the feature selection, when transferring information between different tasks, which may lead to task interference when training the multi-task networks. To address this problem, we propose a novel selective feature-sharing method, and establish a multi-task network for facial expression recognition and facial expression synthesis. The proposed method can effectively transfer beneficial features between different tasks,…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Employing deep learning-based approaches for fine-grained facial expression analysis, such as those involving the estimation of Action Unit (AU) intensities, is difficult due to the lack of a large-scale dataset of real faces with sufficiently diverse AU labels for training. In this paper, we consider how AU-level facial image synthesis can be used to substantially augment such a dataset. We propose an AU synthesis framework that combines the well-known 3D Morphable Model (3DMM), which intrinsically disentangles expression parameters from other face attributes, with models that adversarially g…
University of Dayton（代顿大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
The female facial image beautification usually requires professional editing softwares, which are relatively difficult for common users. In this demo, we introduce a practical system for automatic and personalized facial makeup recommendation and synthesis. First, a model describing the relations among facial features, facial attributes and makeup attributes is learned as the makeup recommendation model for suggesting the most suitable makeup attributes. Then the recommended makeup attributes are seamlessly synthesized onto the input facial image.
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Photorealistic facial expression synthesis from single face image can be widely applied to face recognition, data augmentation for emotion recognition or entertainment. This problem is challenging, in part due to a paucity of labeled facial expression data, making it difficult for algorithms to disambiguate changes due to identity and changes due to expression. In this paper, we propose the conditional difference adversarial autoencoder, CDAAE, for facial expression synthesis. The CDAAE takes a facial image of a previously unseen person and generates an image of that human face with a target e…
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…
Punjab University College of Information Technology（旁遮普大学信息技术学院）
Facial expression synthesis has achieved remarkable advances with the advent of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, GAN-based approaches mostly generate photo-realistic results as long as the testing data distribution is close to the training data distribution. The quality of GAN results significantly degrades when testing images are from a slightly different distribution. Moreover, recent work has shown that facial expressions can be synthesized by changing localized face regions. In this work, we propose a pixel-based facial expression synthesis method in which each output pixel…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Xiamen University of Technology（厦门理工学院）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Recently, deep learning based facial expression recognition (FER) methods have attracted considerable attention and they usually require large-scale labelled training data. Nonetheless, the publicly available facial expression databases typically contain a small amount of labelled data. In this paper, to overcome the above issue, we propose a novel joint deep learning of facial expression synthesis and recognition method for effective FER. More specifically, the proposed method involves a two-stage learning procedure. Firstly, a facial expression synthesis generative adversarial network (FESGA…
Automatic synthesis of faces from visual attributes is an important problem in computer vision and has wide applications in law enforcement and entertainment. With the advent of deep generative convolutional neural networks (CNNs), attempts have been made to synthesize face images from attributes and text descriptions. In this paper, we take a different approach, where we formulate the original problem as a stage-wise learning problem. We first synthesize the facial sketch corresponding to the visual attributes and then we generate the face image based on the synthesized sketch. The proposed f…
University of Tokyo（东京大学）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；NII（国立信息学研究所）
This paper aims to conduct a comprehensive study on facial-sketch synthesis (FSS). However, due to the high costs of obtaining hand-drawn sketch datasets, there lacks a complete benchmark for assessing the development of FSS algorithms over the last decade. We first introduce a high-quality dataset for FSS, named FS2K, which consists of 2,104 image-sketch pairs spanning three types of sketch styles, image backgrounds, lighting conditions, skin colors, and facial attributes. FS2K differs from previous FSS datasets in difficulty, diversity, and scalability and should thus facilitate the progress…
DNPM: A Neural Parametric Model for the Synthesis of Facial Geometric Details
School of Informatics, Xiamen University（厦门大学信息学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；China Mobile (Hangzhou) Information Technology Co., Ltd.（中国移动（杭州）信息技术有限公司）；School of Computing and Data Sciences, Xiamen University Malaysia（马来西亚厦门大学计算与数据科学学院）
Training facial emotion recognition models requires large sets of data and costly annotation processes. To alleviate this problem, we developed a gamified method of acquiring annotated facial emotion data without an explicit labeling effort by humans. The game, which we named Facegame, challenges the players to imitate a displayed image of a face that portrays a particular basic emotion. Every round played by the player creates new data that consists of a set of facial features and landmarks, already annotated with the emotion label of the target facial expression. Such an approach effectively…
Punjab University College of Information Technology（旁遮普大学信息技术学院）；Information Technology University（信息技术大学）
Compared to facial expression recognition, expression synthesis requires a very high-dimensional mapping. This problem exacerbates with increasing image sizes and limits existing expression synthesis approaches to relatively small images. We observe that facial expressions often constitute sparsely distributed and locally correlated changes from one expression to another. By exploiting this observation, the number of parameters in an expression synthesis model can be significantly reduced. Therefore, we propose a constrained version of ridge regression that exploits the local and sparse struct…
Erasmus MC（伊拉斯姆斯大学医学中心）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Confounding bias is a crucial problem when applying machine learning to practice, especially in clinical practice. We consider the problem of learning representations independent to multiple biases. In literature, this is mostly solved by purging the bias information from learned representations. We however expect this strategy to harm the diversity of information in the representation, and thus limiting its prospective usage (e.g., interpretation). Therefore, we propose to mitigate the bias while keeping almost all information in the latent representations, which enables us to observe and int…
This paper presents a generative adversarial learning-based human upper body video synthesis approach to generate an upper body video of target person that is consistent with the body motion, face expression, and pose of the person in source video. We use upper body keypoints, facial action units and poses as intermediate representations between source video and target video. Instead of directly transferring the source video to the target video, we firstly map the source person's facial action units and poses into the target person's facial landmarks, then combine the normalized upper body key…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；PhiGent Robotics（鉴智机器人）
Talking head synthesis is an emerging technology with wide applications in film dubbing, virtual avatars and online education. Recent NeRF-based methods generate more natural talking videos, as they better capture the 3D structural information of faces. However, a specific model needs to be trained for each identity with a large dataset. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Facial Radiance Fields (DFRF) for few-shot talking head synthesis, which can rapidly generalize to an unseen identity with few training data. Different from the existing NeRF-based methods which directly encode the 3D geometry…
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Istanbul Technical University（伊斯坦布尔理工大学）
Cross-domain synthesizing realistic faces to learn deep models has attracted increasing attention for facial expression analysis as it helps to improve the performance of expression recognition accuracy despite having small number of real training images. However, learning from synthetic face images can be problematic due to the distribution discrepancy between low-quality synthetic images and real face images and may not achieve the desired performance when the learned model applies to real world scenarios. To this end, we propose a new attribute guided face image synthesis to perform a trans…
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Age estimation is a technique for predicting human ages from digital facial images, which analyzes a person's face image and estimates his/her age based on the year measure. Nowadays, intelligent age estimation and age synthesis have become particularly prevalent research topics in computer vision and face verification systems. Age synthesis is defined to render a facial image aesthetically with rejuvenating and natural aging effects on the person's face. Age estimation is defined to label a facial image automatically with the age group (year range) or the exact age (year) of the person's face…
Manipulating facial expressions is a challenging task due to fine-grained shape changes produced by facial muscles and the lack of input-output pairs for supervised learning. Unlike previous methods using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), which rely on cycle-consistency loss or sparse geometry (landmarks) loss for expression synthesis, we propose a novel GAN framework to exploit 3D dense (depth and surface normals) information for expression manipulation. However, a large-scale dataset containing RGB images with expression annotations and their corresponding depth maps is not available. T…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Facial expression recognition (FER) is an essential task for understanding human behaviors. As one of the most informative behaviors of humans, facial expressions are often compound and variable, which is manifested by the fact that different people may express the same expression in very different ways. However, most FER methods still use one-hot or soft labels as the supervision, which lack sufficient semantic descriptions of facial expressions and are less interpretable. Recently, contrastive vision-language pre-training (VLP) models (e.g., CLIP) use text as supervision and have injected ne…
Face sketch-photo synthesis is a critical application in law enforcement and digital entertainment industry where the goal is to learn the mapping between a face sketch image and its corresponding photo-realistic image. However, the limited number of paired sketch-photo training data usually prevents the current frameworks to learn a robust mapping between the geometry of sketches and their matching photo-realistic images. Consequently, in this work, we present an approach for learning to synthesize a photo-realistic image from a face sketch in an unsupervised fashion. In contrast to current u…
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey（罗格斯新泽西州立大学）
Synthesizing face sketches from real photos and its inverse have many applications. However, photo/sketch synthesis remains a challenging problem due to the fact that photo and sketch have different characteristics. In this work, we consider this task as an image-to-image translation problem and explore the recently popular generative models (GANs) to generate high-quality realistic photos from sketches and sketches from photos. Recent GAN-based methods have shown promising results on image-to-image translation problems and photo-to-sketch synthesis in particular, however, they are known to ha…
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Psyche AI Inc.（Psyche AI公司）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Achieving high synchronization in the synthesis of realistic, speech-driven talking head videos presents a significant challenge. Traditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) struggle to maintain consistent facial identity, while Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) methods, although they can address this issue, often produce mismatched lip movements, inadequate facial expressions, and unstable head poses. A lifelike talking head requires synchronized coordination of subject identity, lip movements, facial expressions, and head poses. The absence of these synchronizations is a fundamental flaw, …
Univ. Lille（里尔大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Centrale Lille（里尔中央理工学院）；IMT Lille Douai（里尔杜埃国立高等矿业电信学院）；University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
We propose an automatic method for pain intensity measurement from video. For each video, pain intensity was measured using the dynamics of facial movement using 66 facial points. Gram matrices formulation was used for facial points trajectory representations on the Riemannian manifold of symmetric positive semi-definite matrices of fixed rank. Curve fitting and temporal alignment were then used to smooth the extracted trajectories. A Support Vector Regression model was then trained to encode the extracted trajectories into ten pain intensity levels consistent with the Visual Analogue Scale fo…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University at Buffalo, State University of New York（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）
Face synthesis is an important problem in computer vision with many applications. In this work, we describe a new method, namely LandmarkGAN, to synthesize faces based on facial landmarks as input. Facial landmarks are a natural, intuitive, and effective representation for facial expressions and orientations, which are independent from the target's texture or color and background scene. Our method is able to transform a set of facial landmarks into new faces of different subjects, while retains the same facial expression and orientation. Experimental results on face synthesis and reenactments …
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 face-related applications with a public available dataset, synthesizing non-linear facial variations (e.g., facial expression, head-pose, illumination, etc.) through a generative model is helpful in addressing the lack of training data. In reality, however, there is insufficient data to even train the generative model for face synthesis. In this paper, we propose Differential Generative Adversarial Networks (D-GAN) that can perform photo-realistic face synthesis even when training data is small. Two discriminators are devised to ensure the generator to approximate a face manifold, which can…
TalkingGaussian: Structure-Persistent 3D Talking Head Synthesis via Gaussian Splatting
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院半导体研究所）；Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）；RIKEN AIP（理化学研究所人工智能项目）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
FaceKit: a Toolkit for Interpretable Facial Phenotyping, Synthetic Image Generation and Privacy Analysis in Rare Diseases
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；New York Genome Center（纽约基因组中心）；Havard Westlake School（哈佛西湖学校）；University Hospital Bonn（波恩大学医院）；Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat Bonn（波恩大学）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
Building facial analysis systems that generalize to extreme variations in lighting and facial expressions is a challenging problem that can potentially be alleviated using natural-looking synthetic data. Towards that, we propose LEGAN, a novel synthesis framework that leverages perceptual quality judgments for jointly manipulating lighting and expressions in face images, without requiring paired training data. LEGAN disentangles the lighting and expression subspaces and performs transformations in the feature space before upscaling to the desired output image. The fidelity of the synthetic ima…
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Face photo-sketch synthesis aims at generating a facial sketch/photo conditioned on a given photo/sketch. It is of wide applications including digital entertainment and law enforcement. Precisely depicting face photos/sketches remains challenging due to the restrictions on structural realism and textural consistency. While existing methods achieve compelling results, they mostly yield blurred effects and great deformation over various facial components, leading to the unrealistic feeling of synthesized images. To tackle this challenge, in this work, we propose to use the facial composition inf…
