Ye Pan

Most current audio-driven facial animation research primarily focuses on generating videos with neutral emotions. While some studies have addressed the generation of facial videos driven by emotional audio, efficiently generating high-quality talking head videos that integrate both emotional expressions and style features remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose ESGaussianFace, an innovative framework for emotional and stylized audio-driven facial animation. Our approach leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct 3D scenes and render videos, ensuring efficient generation of 3D consistent results. We propose an emotion-audio-guided spatial attention method that effectively integrates emotion features with audio content features. Through emotion-guided attention, the model is able to reconstruct facial details across different emotional states more accurately. To achieve emotional and stylized deformations of the 3D Gaussian points through emotion and style features, we introduce two 3D Gaussian deformation predictors. Futhermore, we propose a multi-stage training strategy, enabling the step-by-step learning of the character’s lip movements, emotional variations, and style features. Our generated results exhibit high efficiency, high quality, and 3D consistency. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques in terms of lip movement accuracy, expression variation, and style feature expressiveness.

Zero-shot text-to-video diffusion models are crafted to expand pre-trained image diffusion models to the video domain without additional training. In recent times, prevailing techniques commonly rely on existing shapes as constraints and introduce inter-frame attention to ensure texture consistency. However, such shape constraints tend to restrict the stylized geometric deformation of videos and inadvertently neglect the original texture characteristics. Furthermore, existing methods suffer from flickering and inconsistent facial expressions. In this paper, we present DiffPortraitVideo. The framework employs a diffusion model-based feature and attention injection mechanism to generate key frames, with cross-frame constraints to enforce coherence and adaptive feature fusion to ensure expression consistency. Our approach achieves high spatio-temporal and expression consistency while retaining the textual and original image properties. Extensive and comprehensive experiments are conducted to validate the efficacy of our proposed framework in generating personalized, high-quality, and coherent videos. This not only showcases the superiority of our method over existing approaches but also paves the way for further research and development in the field of text-to-video generation with enhanced personalization and quality.

Audio-driven 3D facial animation is crucial for enhancing the metaverse's realism, immersion, and interactivity. While most existing methods focus on generating highly realistic and lively 2D talking head videos by leveraging extensive 2D video datasets these approaches work in pixel space and are not easily adaptable to 3D environments. We present VASA-Rig, which has achieved a significant advancement in the realism of lip-audio synchronization, facial dynamics, and head movements. In particular, we introduce a novel rig parameter-based emotional talking face dataset and propose the Latents2Rig model, which facilitates the transformation of 2D facial animations into 3D. Unlike mesh-based models, VASA-Rig outputs rig parameters, instantiated in this paper as 174 Metahuman rig parameters, making it more suitable for integration into industry-standard pipelines. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both realism and accuracy.

Real-time motion generation has garnered significant attention within the fields of computer animation and gaming. Existing methods typically realize motion control via isolated style or content labels, resulting in short, simply motion clips. In this paper, we propose a motion generation framework, called SPORT (“from zero-Shot Prompt tO Real-Time motion generation”), for generating real-time and ever-changing motions using zero-shot prompts. SPORT consists of three primary components: (1) a body-part phase autoencoder that ensures smooth transitions between diverse motions; (2) a body-part content encoder that mitigates semantic gap between texts and motions; (3) a diffusion-based decoder that accelerates the denoising process while enhancing the diversity and realism of motions. Moreover, we develop a prototype for real-time application in Unity, demonstrating that our approach effectively considering the semantic gap caused by abstract style texts and rapidly changing terrains. Through qualitative and quantitative comparisons, we show that SPORT outperforms other approaches in terms of motion quality, style diversity and inference speed.

Facial landmark detection forms the foundation for numerous face-related tasks. Recently, this field has gained substantial attention and made significant advancements. Nonetheless, detecting facial landmarks for stylized characters still remains a challenge. Existing approaches, which are mostly trained on real-human face datasets, struggle to perform well due to the structural variations between real and stylized characters. Additionally, a comprehensive dataset for analyzing stylized characters' facial features is lacking. This study proposes a novel dataset, the Facial Landmark Dataset for Stylized Characters (FLSC), which contains 2674 images and 4086 faces selected from 16 cartoon video clips, together with 98 landmarks per image, labeled by professionals. Besides, we propose StylizedFacePoint: a deep-learning-based method for stylized facial landmark detection that outperforms the existing approaches. This method has also proven to work well for characters with styles outside the training domain. Moreover, we outline two primary types of applications for our dataset and method. For each, we provide a detailed illustrative example.

Audio-driven emotional 3D face animation aims to generate emotionally expressive talking heads with synchronized lip movements. However, previous research has often overlooked the influence of diverse emotions on facial expressions or proved unsuitable for driving MetaHuman models. In response to this deficiency, we introduce EmoFace, a novel audio-driven methodology for creating facial animations with vivid emotional dynamics. Our approach can generate facial expressions with multiple emotions, and has the ability to generate random yet natural blinks and eye movements, while maintaining accurate lip synchronization. We propose independent speech encoders and emotion encoders to learn the relationship between audio, emotion and corresponding facial controller rigs, and finally map into the sequence of controller values. Additionally, we introduce two post-processing techniques dedicated to enhancing the authenticity of the animation, particularly in blinks and eye movements. Furthermore, recognizing the scarcity of emotional audio-visual data suitable for MetaHuman model manipulation, we contribute an emotional audio-visual dataset and derive control parameters for each frames. Our proposed methodology can be applied in producing dialogues animations of non-playable characters (NPCs) in video games, and driving avatars in virtual reality environments. Our further quantitative and qualitative experiments, as well as an user study comparing with existing researches show that our approach demonstrates superior results in driving 3D facial models. The code and sample data are available at https://github.com/SJTU-Lucy/EmoFace.

Portrait stylization is a long-standing task enabling extensive applications. Although 2D-based methods have made great progress in recent years, real-world applications such as metaverse and games often demand 3D content. On the other hand, the requirement of 3D data, which is costly to acquire, significantly impedes the development of 3D portrait stylization methods. In this paper, inspired by the success of 3D-aware GANs that bridge 2D and 3D domains with 3D fields as the intermediate representation for rendering 2D images, we propose a novel method, dubbed HyperStyle3D, based on 3D-aware GANs for 3D portrait stylization. At the core of our method is a hyper-network learned to manipulate the parameters of the generator in a single forward pass. It not only offers a strong capacity to handle multiple styles with a single model, but also enables flexible fine-grained stylization that affects only texture, shape, or local part of the portrait. While the use of 3D-aware GANs bypasses the requirement of 3D data, we further alleviate the necessity of style images with the CLIP model being the style guidance. We conduct an extensive set of experiments across the style, attribute, and shape, and meanwhile, measure the 3D consistency. These experiments demonstrate the superior capability of our HyperStyle3D model in rendering 3D-consistent images in diverse styles, deforming the face shape, and editing various attributes.

Although automatically animating audio-driven talking heads has recently received growing interest, previous efforts have mainly concentrated on achieving lip synchronization with the audio, neglecting two crucial elements for generating expressive videos: emotion style and art style. In this paper, we present an innovative audio-driven talking face generation method called Style2Talker. It involves two stylized stages, namely Style-E and Style-A, which integrate text-controlled emotion style and picture-controlled art style into the final output. In order to prepare the scarce emotional text descriptions corresponding to the videos, we propose a labor-free paradigm that employs large-scale pretrained models to automatically annotate emotional text labels for existing audio-visual datasets. Incorporating the synthetic emotion texts, the Style-E stage utilizes a large-scale CLIP model to extract emotion representations, which are combined with the audio, serving as the condition for an efficient latent diffusion model designed to produce emotional motion coefficients of a 3DMM model. Moving on to the Style-A stage, we develop a coefficient-driven motion generator and an art-specific style path embedded in the well-known StyleGAN. This allows us to synthesize high-resolution artistically stylized talking head videos using the generated emotional motion coefficients and an art style source picture. Moreover, to better preserve image details and avoid artifacts, we provide StyleGAN with the multi-scale content features extracted from the identity image and refine its intermediate feature maps by the designed content encoder and refinement network, respectively. Extensive experimental results demonstrate our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of audio-lip synchronization and performance of both emotion style and art style.

Head generation with diverse identities is an important task in computer vision and computer graphics, widely used in multimedia applications. However, current full-head generation methods require a large number of three-dimensional (3D) scans or multi-view images to train the model, resulting in expensive data acquisition costs. To address this issue, we propose Head3D, a method to generate full 3D heads with limited multi-view images. Specifically, our approach first extracts facial priors represented by tri-planes learned in EG3D, a 3D-aware generative model, and then proposes feature distillation to deliver the 3D frontal faces within complete heads without compromising head integrity. To mitigate the domain gap between the face and head models, we present a dual-discriminator to guide the frontal and back head generation. Our model achieves cost-efficient and diverse complete head generation with photo-realistic renderings and high-quality geometry representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Head3D, both qualitatively and quantitatively.