EmoVOCA: Speech-Driven Emotional 3D Talking Heads

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nocentini, Federico, Ferrari, Claudio, Berretti, Stefano
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Nocentini, Federico
Ferrari, Claudio
Berretti, Stefano
author_facet Nocentini, Federico
Ferrari, Claudio
Berretti, Stefano
contents The domain of 3D talking head generation has witnessed significant progress in recent years. A notable challenge in this field consists in blending speech-related motions with expression dynamics, which is primarily caused by the lack of comprehensive 3D datasets that combine diversity in spoken sentences with a variety of facial expressions. Whereas literature works attempted to exploit 2D video data and parametric 3D models as a workaround, these still show limitations when jointly modeling the two motions. In this work, we address this problem from a different perspective, and propose an innovative data-driven technique that we used for creating a synthetic dataset, called EmoVOCA, obtained by combining a collection of inexpressive 3D talking heads and a set of 3D expressive sequences. To demonstrate the advantages of this approach, and the quality of the dataset, we then designed and trained an emotional 3D talking head generator that accepts a 3D face, an audio file, an emotion label, and an intensity value as inputs, and learns to animate the audio-synchronized lip movements with expressive traits of the face. Comprehensive experiments, both quantitative and qualitative, using our data and generator evidence superior ability in synthesizing convincing animations, when compared with the best performing methods in the literature. Our code and pre-trained model will be made available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_12886
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle EmoVOCA: Speech-Driven Emotional 3D Talking Heads
Nocentini, Federico
Ferrari, Claudio
Berretti, Stefano
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The domain of 3D talking head generation has witnessed significant progress in recent years. A notable challenge in this field consists in blending speech-related motions with expression dynamics, which is primarily caused by the lack of comprehensive 3D datasets that combine diversity in spoken sentences with a variety of facial expressions. Whereas literature works attempted to exploit 2D video data and parametric 3D models as a workaround, these still show limitations when jointly modeling the two motions. In this work, we address this problem from a different perspective, and propose an innovative data-driven technique that we used for creating a synthetic dataset, called EmoVOCA, obtained by combining a collection of inexpressive 3D talking heads and a set of 3D expressive sequences. To demonstrate the advantages of this approach, and the quality of the dataset, we then designed and trained an emotional 3D talking head generator that accepts a 3D face, an audio file, an emotion label, and an intensity value as inputs, and learns to animate the audio-synchronized lip movements with expressive traits of the face. Comprehensive experiments, both quantitative and qualitative, using our data and generator evidence superior ability in synthesizing convincing animations, when compared with the best performing methods in the literature. Our code and pre-trained model will be made available.
title EmoVOCA: Speech-Driven Emotional 3D Talking Heads
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12886