12,767 research outputs found
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
Relating Objective and Subjective Performance Measures for AAM-based Visual Speech Synthesizers
We compare two approaches for synthesizing visual speech using Active Appearance Models (AAMs): one that utilizes acoustic features as input, and one that utilizes a phonetic transcription as input. Both synthesizers are trained using the same data and the performance is measured using both objective and subjective testing. We investigate the impact of likely sources of error in the synthesized visual speech by introducing typical errors into real visual speech sequences and subjectively measuring the perceived degradation. When only a small region (e.g. a single syllable) of ground-truth visual speech is incorrect we find that the subjective score for the entire sequence is subjectively lower than sequences generated by our synthesizers. This observation motivates further consideration of an often ignored issue, which is to what extent are subjective measures correlated with objective measures of performance? Significantly, we find that the most commonly used objective measures of performance are not necessarily the best indicator of viewer perception of quality. We empirically evaluate alternatives and show that the cost of a dynamic time warp of synthesized visual speech parameters to the respective ground-truth parameters is a better indicator of subjective quality
Improving Facial Analysis and Performance Driven Animation through Disentangling Identity and Expression
We present techniques for improving performance driven facial animation,
emotion recognition, and facial key-point or landmark prediction using learned
identity invariant representations. Established approaches to these problems
can work well if sufficient examples and labels for a particular identity are
available and factors of variation are highly controlled. However, labeled
examples of facial expressions, emotions and key-points for new individuals are
difficult and costly to obtain. In this paper we improve the ability of
techniques to generalize to new and unseen individuals by explicitly modeling
previously seen variations related to identity and expression. We use a
weakly-supervised approach in which identity labels are used to learn the
different factors of variation linked to identity separately from factors
related to expression. We show how probabilistic modeling of these sources of
variation allows one to learn identity-invariant representations for
expressions which can then be used to identity-normalize various procedures for
facial expression analysis and animation control. We also show how to extend
the widely used techniques of active appearance models and constrained local
models through replacing the underlying point distribution models which are
typically constructed using principal component analysis with
identity-expression factorized representations. We present a wide variety of
experiments in which we consistently improve performance on emotion
recognition, markerless performance-driven facial animation and facial
key-point tracking.Comment: to appear in Image and Vision Computing Journal (IMAVIS
ICface: Interpretable and Controllable Face Reenactment Using GANs
This paper presents a generic face animator that is able to control the pose
and expressions of a given face image. The animation is driven by human
interpretable control signals consisting of head pose angles and the Action
Unit (AU) values. The control information can be obtained from multiple sources
including external driving videos and manual controls. Due to the interpretable
nature of the driving signal, one can easily mix the information between
multiple sources (e.g. pose from one image and expression from another) and
apply selective post-production editing. The proposed face animator is
implemented as a two-stage neural network model that is learned in a
self-supervised manner using a large video collection. The proposed
Interpretable and Controllable face reenactment network (ICface) is compared to
the state-of-the-art neural network-based face animation techniques in multiple
tasks. The results indicate that ICface produces better visual quality while
being more versatile than most of the comparison methods. The introduced model
could provide a lightweight and easy to use tool for a multitude of advanced
image and video editing tasks.Comment: Accepted in WACV-202
FEAFA: A Well-Annotated Dataset for Facial Expression Analysis and 3D Facial Animation
Facial expression analysis based on machine learning requires large number of
well-annotated data to reflect different changes in facial motion. Publicly
available datasets truly help to accelerate research in this area by providing
a benchmark resource, but all of these datasets, to the best of our knowledge,
are limited to rough annotations for action units, including only their
absence, presence, or a five-level intensity according to the Facial Action
Coding System. To meet the need for videos labeled in great detail, we present
a well-annotated dataset named FEAFA for Facial Expression Analysis and 3D
Facial Animation. One hundred and twenty-two participants, including children,
young adults and elderly people, were recorded in real-world conditions. In
addition, 99,356 frames were manually labeled using Expression Quantitative
Tool developed by us to quantify 9 symmetrical FACS action units, 10
asymmetrical (unilateral) FACS action units, 2 symmetrical FACS action
descriptors and 2 asymmetrical FACS action descriptors, and each action unit or
action descriptor is well-annotated with a floating point number between 0 and
1. To provide a baseline for use in future research, a benchmark for the
regression of action unit values based on Convolutional Neural Networks are
presented. We also demonstrate the potential of our FEAFA dataset for 3D facial
animation. Almost all state-of-the-art algorithms for facial animation are
achieved based on 3D face reconstruction. We hence propose a novel method that
drives virtual characters only based on action unit value regression of the 2D
video frames of source actors.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure
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