6 research outputs found
Talking Face Generation by Adversarially Disentangled Audio-Visual Representation
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 actually a
composition of both subject-related information and speech-related information.
These two spaces are then explicitly disentangled through a novel
associative-and-adversarial training process. This disentangled representation
has an advantage where both audio and video can serve as inputs for generation.
Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach generates realistic
talking face sequences on arbitrary subjects with much clearer lip motion
patterns than previous work. We also demonstrate the learned audio-visual
representation is extremely useful for the tasks of automatic lip reading and
audio-video retrieval.Comment: AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2019) Oral
Presentation. Code, models, and video results are available on our webpage:
https://liuziwei7.github.io/projects/TalkingFace.htm
Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles
Audio-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, but achieving
realistic, human-like performance is still unsolved. This is due to the lack of
available 3D datasets, models, and standard evaluation metrics. To address
this, we introduce a unique 4D face dataset with about 29 minutes of 4D scans
captured at 60 fps and synchronized audio from 12 speakers. We then train a
neural network on our dataset that factors identity from facial motion. The
learned model, VOCA (Voice Operated Character Animation) takes any speech
signal as input - even speech in languages other than English - and
realistically animates a wide range of adult faces. Conditioning on subject
labels during training allows the model to learn a variety of realistic
speaking styles. VOCA also provides animator controls to alter speaking style,
identity-dependent facial shape, and pose (i.e. head, jaw, and eyeball
rotations) during animation. To our knowledge, VOCA is the only realistic 3D
facial animation model that is readily applicable to unseen subjects without
retargeting. This makes VOCA suitable for tasks like in-game video, virtual
reality avatars, or any scenario in which the speaker, speech, or language is
not known in advance. We make the dataset and model available for research
purposes at http://voca.is.tue.mpg.de.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201
A Photo-realistic Voice-bot
Technology is at the point where systems are capable of synthesizing video of human actors indistinguishably from ones in which the actor is present. This research investigates whether or not it is possible to use this technology in order to create a system which, allows video generation of a human actor, that is able to interact with a user through speech in real-time, whilst also remaining indistinguishable from a real human actor. In other words, a photo-realistic voicebot. The work discusses the motivations and ethics, but also presents and tests a prototype system. The prototype aims to take advantage of the latest in real-time video manipulation software to create a natural sounding conversation with an artificially synthesized video
Data-driven Communicative Behaviour Generation: A Survey
The development of data-driven behaviour generating systems has recently become the focus of considerable attention in the fields of human–agent interaction and human–robot interaction. Although rule-based approaches were dominant for years, these proved inflexible and expensive to develop. The difficulty of developing production rules, as well as the need for manual configuration to generate artificial behaviours, places a limit on how complex and diverse rule-based behaviours can be. In contrast, actual human–human interaction data collected using tracking and recording devices makes humanlike multimodal co-speech behaviour generation possible using machine learning and specifically, in recent years, deep learning. This survey provides an overview of the state of the art of deep learning-based co-speech behaviour generation models and offers an outlook for future research in this area.</jats:p