Yudian Zheng

Yudian Zheng, Xiaodong Cun, Menghan Xia et al.

Understanding semantic intricacies and high-level concepts is essential in image sketch generation, and this challenge becomes even more formidable when applied to the domain of videos. To address this, we propose a novel optimization-based framework for sketching videos represented by the frame-wise Bézier curve. In detail, we first propose a cross-frame stroke initialization approach to warm up the location and the width of each curve. Then, we optimize the locations of these curves by utilizing a semantic loss based on CLIP features and a newly designed consistency loss using the self-decomposed 2D atlas network. Built upon these design elements, the resulting sketch video showcases impressive visual abstraction and temporal coherence. Furthermore, by transforming a video into SVG lines through the sketching process, our method unlocks applications in sketch-based video editing and video doodling, enabled through video composition, as exemplified in the teaser.

Yiguo Jiang, Xiaodong Cun, Yong Zhang et al.

Emotional talking head synthesis aims to generate talking portrait videos with vivid expressions. Existing methods still exhibit limitations in control flexibility, motion naturalness, and expression quality. Moreover, currently available datasets are primarily collected in lab settings, further exacerbating these shortcomings. Consequently, these limitations substantially hinder practical applications in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose EmoCAST, a diffusion-based framework with two key modules for precise text-driven emotional synthesis. In appearance modeling, emotional prompts are integrated through a text-guided decoupled emotive module, enhancing the spatial knowledge to improve emotion comprehension. To improve the relationship between audio and emotion, we introduce an emotive audio attention module to capture the interplay between controlled emotion and driving audio, generating emotion-aware features to guide more precise facial motion synthesis. Additionally, we construct an emotional talking head dataset with comprehensive emotive text descriptions to optimize the framework's performance. Based on the proposed dataset, we propose an emotion-aware sampling training strategy and a progressive functional training strategy that further improve the model's ability to capture nuanced expressive features and achieve accurate lip-synchronization. Overall, EmoCAST achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating realistic, emotionally expressive, and audio-synchronized talking-head videos. Project Page: https://github.com/GVCLab/EmoCAST

Chengliang Chai, Ju Fan, Guoliang Li et al.

Many data mining tasks cannot be completely addressed by auto- mated processes, such as sentiment analysis and image classification. Crowdsourcing is an effective way to harness the human cognitive ability to process these machine-hard tasks. Thanks to public crowdsourcing platforms, e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk and Crowd- Flower, we can easily involve hundreds of thousands of ordinary workers (i.e., the crowd) to address these machine-hard tasks. In this tutorial, we will survey and synthesize a wide spectrum of existing studies on crowd-powered data mining. We first give an overview of crowdsourcing, and then summarize the fundamental techniques, including quality control, cost control, and latency control, which must be considered in crowdsourced data mining. Next we review crowd-powered data mining operations, including classification, clustering, pattern mining, machine learning using the crowd (including deep learning, transfer learning and semi-supervised learning) and knowledge discovery. Finally, we provide the emerging challenges in crowdsourced data mining.