EMMN: Emotional Motion Memory Network for Audio-driven Emotional Talking Face Generation

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Abstract
Synthesizing expression is essential to create realistic talking faces. Previous works consider expressions and mouth shapes as a whole and predict them solely from audio inputs. However, the limited information contained in audio, such as phonemes and coarse emotion embedding, may not be suitable as the source of elaborate expressions. Besides, since expressions are tightly coupled to lip motions, generating expression from other sources is tricky and always neglects expression performed on mouth region, leading to inconsistency between them. To tackle the issues, this paper proposes Emotional Motion Memory Net (EMMN) that synthesizes expression overall on the talking face via emotion embedding and lip motion instead of the sole audio. Specifically, we extract emotion embedding from audio and design Motion Reconstruction module to decompose ground truth videos into mouth features and expression features before training, where the latter encode all facial factors about expression. During training, the emotion embedding and mouth features are used as keys, and the corresponding expression features are used as values to create key-value pairs stored in the proposed Motion Memory Net. Hence, once the audio-relevant mouth features and emotion embedding are individually predicted from audio at inference time, we treat them as a query to retrieve the best-matching expression features, performing expression overall on the face and thus avoiding inconsistent results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate high-quality talking face videos with accurate lip movements and vivid expressions on unseen subjects.
Funding Information
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China
  • Tencent