Dmitry Korobchenko

Chaeyeon Chung, Ilya Fedorov, Michael Huang et al. · nvidia

Audio-driven facial animation presents an effective solution for animating digital avatars. In this paper, we detail the technical aspects of NVIDIA Audio2Face-3D, including data acquisition, network architecture, retargeting methodology, evaluation metrics, and use cases. Audio2Face-3D system enables real-time interaction between human users and interactive avatars, facilitating facial animation authoring for game characters. To assist digital avatar creators and game developers in generating realistic facial animations, we have open-sourced Audio2Face-3D networks, SDK, training framework, and example dataset.

Ilya Fedorov, Dmitry Korobchenko

This work proposes to explore a new area of dynamic speech emotion recognition. Unlike traditional methods, we assume that each audio track is associated with a sequence of emotions active at different moments in time. The study particularly focuses on the animation of emotional 3D avatars. We propose a multi-stage method that includes the training of a classical speech emotion recognition model, synthetic generation of emotional sequences, and further model improvement based on human feedback. Additionally, we introduce a novel approach to modeling emotional mixtures based on the Dirichlet distribution. The models are evaluated based on ground-truth emotions extracted from a dataset of 3D facial animations. We compare our models against the sliding window approach. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of Dirichlet-based approach in modeling emotional mixtures. Incorporating human feedback further improves the model quality while providing a simplified annotation procedure.