For realistic talking head generation, creating natural head motion while maintaining accurate lip synchronization is essential. To fulfill this challenging task, we propose DisCoHead, a novel method to disentangle and control head pose and facial expressions without supervision. DisCoHead uses a single geometric transformation as a bottleneck to isolate and extract head motion from a head-driving video. Either an affine or a thin-plate spline transformation can be used and both work well as geometric bottlenecks. We enhance the efficiency of DisCoHead by integrating a dense motion estimator and the encoder of a generator which are originally separate modules. Taking a step further, we also propose a neural mix approach where dense motion is estimated and applied implicitly by the encoder. After applying the disentangled head motion to a source identity, DisCoHead controls the mouth region according to speech audio, and it blinks eyes and moves eyebrows following a separate driving video of the eye region, via the weight modulation of convolutional neural networks. The experiments using multiple datasets show that DisCoHead successfully generates realistic audio-and-video-driven talking heads and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://deepbrainai-research.github.io/discohead/
Talking face generation aims to synthesize a sequence of face images that correspond to a clip of speech. This is a challenging task because face appearance variation and semantics of speech are coupled together in the subtle movements of the talking face regions. Existing works either construct specific face appearance model on specific subjects or model the transformation between lip motion and speech. In this work, we integrate both aspects and enable arbitrary-subject talking face generation by learning disentangled audio-visual representation. We find that the talking face sequence is act…
We present a novel one-shot talking head synthesis method that achieves disentangled and fine-grained control over lip motion, eye gaze&blink, head pose, and emotional expression. We represent different motions via disentangled latent representations and leverage an image generator to synthesize talking heads from them. To effectively disentangle each motion factor, we propose a progressive disentangled representation learning strategy by separating the factors in a coarse-to-fine manner, where we first extract unified motion feature from the driving signal, and then isolate each fine-grained …
While recent advances in deep neural networks have made it possible to render high-quality images, generating photo-realistic and personalized talking head remains challenging. With given audio, the key to tackling this task is synchronizing lip movement and simultaneously generating personalized attributes like head movement and eye blink. In this work, we observe that the input audio is highly correlated to lip motion while less correlated to other personalized attributes (e.g., head movements). Inspired by this, we propose a novel framework based on neural radiance field to pursue high-fide…
College of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Hohai University（人工智能与自动化学院，河海大学）；College of DaYu, Hohai University（大禹学院，河海大学）；College of Water Conserwancy and Hydropower Engineering, Hohai University（水利水电工程学院，河海大学）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology（计算机科学与技术学院，浙江工业大学）
All previous methods for audio-driven talking head generation assume the input audio to be clean with a neutral tone. As we show empirically, one can easily break these systems by simply adding certain background noise to the utterance or changing its emotional tone (to such as sad). To make talking head generation robust to such variations, we propose an explicit audio representation learning framework that disentangles audio sequences into various factors such as phonetic content, emotional tone, background noise and others. We conduct experiments to validate that conditioned on disentangled…
DisentTalk: Cross-lingual Talking Face Generation via Semantic Disentangled Diffusion Model
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）
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）
We propose a novel approach for few-shot talking-head synthesis. While recent works in neural talking heads have produced promising results, they can still produce images that do not preserve the identity of the subject in source images. We posit this is a result of the entangled representation of each subject in a single latent code that models 3D shape information, identity cues, colors, lighting and even background details. In contrast, we propose to factorize the representation of a subject into its spatial and style components. Our method generates a target frame in two steps. First, it p…
GoHD: Gaze-oriented and Highly Disentangled Portrait Animation with Rhythmic Poses and Realistic Expression
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；NIO（蔚来）；Banma（斑马）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
In this paper, we introduce a simple and novel framework for one-shot audio-driven talking head generation. Unlike prior works that require additional driving sources for controlled synthesis in a deterministic manner, we instead probabilistically sample all the holistic lip-irrelevant facial motions (i.e. pose, expression, blink, gaze, etc.) to semantically match the input audio while still maintaining both the photo-realism of audio-lip synchronization and the overall naturalness. This is achieved by our newly proposed audio-to-visual diffusion prior trained on top of the mapping between aud…
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…
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
One-shot talking face generation aims at synthesizing a high-quality talking face video from an arbitrary portrait image, driven by a video or an audio segment. One challenging quality factor is the resolution of the output video: higher resolution conveys more details. In this work, we investigate the latent feature space of a pre-trained StyleGAN and discover some excellent spatial transformation properties. Upon the observation, we explore the possibility of using a pre-trained StyleGAN to break through the resolution limit of training datasets. We propose a novel unified framework based on…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Naver Corporation（Naver公司）
The objective of this paper is to learn representations of speaker identity without access to manually annotated data. To do so, we develop a self-supervised learning objective that exploits the natural cross-modal synchrony between faces and audio in video. The key idea behind our approach is to tease apart--without annotation--the representations of linguistic content and speaker identity. We construct a two-stream architecture which: (1) shares low-level features common to both representations; and (2) provides a natural mechanism for explicitly disentangling these factors, offering the pot…
Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.（平安科技（深圳）有限公司）
This paper investigates a novel task of talking face video generation solely from speeches. The speech-to-video generation technique can spark interesting applications in entertainment, customer service, and human-computer-interaction industries. Indeed, the timbre, accent and speed in speeches could contain rich information relevant to speakers' appearance. The challenge mainly lies in disentangling the distinct visual attributes from audio signals. In this article, we propose a light-weight, cross-modal distillation method to extract disentangled emotional and identity information from unlab…
Recent works have shown how realistic talking face images can be obtained under the supervision of geometry guidance, e.g., facial landmark or boundary. To alleviate the demand for manual annotations, in this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised hybrid model (DAE-GAN) that learns how to reenact face naturally given large amounts of unlabeled videos. Our approach combines two deforming autoencoders with the latest advances in the conditional generation. On the one hand, we adopt the deforming autoencoder to disentangle identity and pose representations. A strong prior in talking face video…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；University of California San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院）
EmoTalk: Speech-Driven Emotional Disentanglement for 3D Face Animation
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Psyche AI Inc.（赛琪人工智能公司）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
One-shot video-driven talking face generation aims at producing a synthetic talking video by transferring the facial motion from a video to an arbitrary portrait image. Head pose and facial expression are always entangled in facial motion and transferred simultaneously. However, the entanglement sets up a barrier for these methods to be used in video portrait editing directly, where it may require to modify the expression only while maintaining the pose unchanged. One challenge of decoupling pose and expression is the lack of paired data, such as the same pose but different expressions. Only a…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Despite previous success in generating audio-driven talking heads, most of the previous studies focus on the correlation between speech content and the mouth shape. Facial emotion, which is one of the most important features on natural human faces, is always neglected in their methods. In this work, we present Emotional Video Portraits (EVP), a system for synthesizing high-quality video portraits with vivid emotional dynamics driven by audios. Specifically, we propose the Cross-Reconstructed Emotion Disentanglement technique to decompose speech into two decoupled spaces, i.e., a duration-indep…
