THEval. Evaluation Framework for Talking Head Video Generation
Inria Centre at Université Côte d’Azur（Inria 雅克-路易·科蒂尔大学中心）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；da/sec - Biometrics and Security Research Group, Hochschule Darmstadt（da/sec 生物识别与安全研究组，达姆斯塔特大学）
Video generation has achieved remarkable progress, with generated videos increasingly resembling real ones. However, the rapid advance in generation has outpaced the development of adequate evaluation metrics. Currently, the assessment of talking head generation primarily relies on limited metrics, evaluating general video quality, lip synchronization, and on conducting user studies. Motivated by this, we propose a new evaluation framework comprising 8 metrics related to three dimensions (i) quality, (ii) naturalness, and (iii) synchronization. In selecting the metrics, we place emphasis on efficiency, as well as alignment with human preferences. Based on this considerations, we streamline to analyze fine-grained dynamics of head, mouth, and eyebrows, as well as face quality. Our extensive experiments on 85,000 videos generated by 17 state-of-the-art models suggest that while many algorithms excel in lip synchronization, they face challenges with generating expressiveness and artifact-free details. These videos were generated based on a novel real dataset, that we have curated, in order to mitigate bias of training data. Our proposed benchmark framework is aimed at evaluating the improvement of generative methods. Original code, dataset and leaderboards will be publicly released and regularly updated with new methods, in order to reflect progress in the field.
OSM-Net: One-to-Many One-shot Talking Head Generation with Spontaneous Head Motions
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）
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…
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, …
We propose a neural talking-head video synthesis model and demonstrate its application to video conferencing. Our model learns to synthesize a talking-head video using a source image containing the target person's appearance and a driving video that dictates the motion in the output. Our motion is encoded based on a novel keypoint representation, where the identity-specific and motion-related information is decomposed unsupervisedly. Extensive experimental validation shows that our model outperforms competing methods on benchmark datasets. Moreover, our compact keypoint representation enables …
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…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；DeepScience Tech Ltd.（深度科学科技有限公司）
Audio driven talking head synthesis is a challenging task that attracts increasing attention in recent years. Although existing methods based on 2D landmarks or 3D face models can synthesize accurate lip synchronization and rhythmic head pose for arbitrary identity, they still have limitations, such as the cut feeling in the mouth mapping and the lack of skin highlights. The morphed region is blurry compared to the surrounding face. A Keypoint Based Enhancement (KPBE) method is proposed for audio driven free view talking head synthesis to improve the naturalness of the generated video. Firstly…
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…
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…
Over the years, performance evaluation has become essential in computer vision, enabling tangible progress in many sub-fields. While talking-head video generation has become an emerging research topic, existing evaluations on this topic present many limitations. For example, most approaches use human subjects (e.g., via Amazon MTurk) to evaluate their research claims directly. This subjective evaluation is cumbersome, unreproducible, and may impend the evolution of new research. In this work, we present a carefully-designed benchmark for evaluating talking-head video generation with standardiz…
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）
We propose an audio-driven talking-head method to generate photo-realistic talking-head videos from a single reference image. In this work, we tackle two key challenges: (i) producing natural head motions that match speech prosody, and (ii) maintaining the appearance of a speaker in a large head motion while stabilizing the non-face regions. We first design a head pose predictor by modeling rigid 6D head movements with a motion-aware recurrent neural network (RNN). In this way, the predicted head poses act as the low-frequency holistic movements of a talking head, thus allowing our latter netw…
Talking head video generation aims to produce a synthetic human face video that contains the identity and pose information respectively from a given source image and a driving video.Existing works for this task heavily rely on 2D representations (e.g. appearance and motion) learned from the input images. However, dense 3D facial geometry (e.g. pixel-wise depth) is extremely important for this task as it is particularly beneficial for us to essentially generate accurate 3D face structures and distinguish noisy information from the possibly cluttered background. Nevertheless, dense 3D geometry a…
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…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
We present VideoReTalking, a new system to edit the faces of a real-world talking head video according to input audio, producing a high-quality and lip-syncing output video even with a different emotion. Our system disentangles this objective into three sequential tasks: (1) face video generation with a canonical expression; (2) audio-driven lip-sync; and (3) face enhancement for improving photo-realism. Given a talking-head video, we first modify the expression of each frame according to the same expression template using the expression editing network, resulting in a video with the canonical…
Talk Like You: Imitating How You Speak in Real-Time Talking Head Generation
MAIS, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所多模态人工智能系统全国重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；CAIR, HKISI, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院香港创新研究院人工智能与机器人创新中心）；SCSE, FIE, M.U.S.T.（澳门科技大学创新工程学院计算机科学与工程学院）
IIIT, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术研究所）；University of Bath（巴斯大学）
This paper proposes a video editor based on OpenShot with several state-of-the-art facial video editing algorithms as added functionalities. Our editor provides an easy-to-use interface to apply modern lip-syncing algorithms interactively. Apart from lip-syncing, the editor also uses audio and facial re-enactment to generate expressive talking faces. The manual control improves the overall experience of video editing without missing out on the benefits of modern synthetic video generation algorithms. This control enables us to lip-sync complex dubbed movie scenes, interviews, television shows,…
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
The ability to envisage the visual of a talking face based just on hearing a voice is a unique human capability. There have been a number of works that have solved for this ability recently. We differ from these approaches by enabling a variety of talking face generations based on single audio input. Indeed, just having the ability to generate a single talking face would make a system almost robotic in nature. In contrast, our unsupervised stochastic audio-to-video generation model allows for diverse generations from a single audio input. Particularly, we present an unsupervised stochastic aud…
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…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）；Kwai Inc.（快手公司）
In this paper, we present a dynamic convolution kernel (DCK) strategy for convolutional neural networks. Using a fully convolutional network with the proposed DCKs, high-quality talking-face video can be generated from multi-modal sources (i.e., unmatched audio and video) in real time, and our trained model is robust to different identities, head postures, and input audios. Our proposed DCKs are specially designed for audio-driven talking face video generation, leading to a simple yet effective end-to-end system. We also provide a theoretical analysis to interpret why DCKs work. Experimental r…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Adobe（奥多比）
Editing talking-head video to change the speech content or to remove filler words is challenging. We propose a novel method to edit talking-head video based on its transcript to produce a realistic output video in which the dialogue of the speaker has been modified, while maintaining a seamless audio-visual flow (i.e. no jump cuts). Our method automatically annotates an input talking-head video with phonemes, visemes, 3D face pose and geometry, reflectance, expression and scene illumination per frame. To edit a video, the user has to only edit the transcript, and an optimization strategy then …
With the advance of deep learning technology, automatic video generation from audio or text has become an emerging and promising research topic. In this paper, we present a novel approach to synthesize video from the text. The method builds a phoneme-pose dictionary and trains a generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate video from interpolated phoneme poses. Compared to audio-driven video generation algorithms, our approach has a number of advantages: 1) It only needs a fraction of the training data used by an audio-driven approach; 2) It is more flexible and not subject to vulnerabilit…
VedicTHG: Symbolic Vedic Computation for Low-Resource Talking-Head Generation in Educational Avatars
Engineering Sciences, Homi Bhabha National Institute Training School Complex（工程科学，霍米·巴哈瓦国家研究所培训学校复杂区）；Computer and Informatics Group, Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre（计算机与信息组，变能回旋加速器中心）
