Zhaojie Chu

Zhaojie Chu, Kailing Guo, Xiaofen Xing et al.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation is a challenging cross-modal task that has attracted growing research interest. During speaking activities, the mouth displays strong motions, while the other facial regions typically demonstrate comparatively weak activity levels. Existing approaches often simplify the process by directly mapping single-level speech features to the entire facial animation, which overlook the differences in facial activity intensity leading to overly smoothed facial movements. In this study, we propose a novel framework, CorrTalk, which effectively establishes the temporal correlation between hierarchical speech features and facial activities of different intensities across distinct regions. A novel facial activity intensity metric is defined to distinguish between strong and weak facial activity, obtained by computing the short-time Fourier transform of facial vertex displacements. Based on the variances in facial activity, we propose a dual-branch decoding framework to synchronously synthesize strong and weak facial activity, which guarantees wider intensity facial animation synthesis. Furthermore, a weighted hierarchical feature encoder is proposed to establish temporal correlation between hierarchical speech features and facial activity at different intensities, which ensures lip-sync and plausible facial expressions. Extensive qualitatively and quantitatively experiments as well as a user study indicate that our CorrTalk outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. The source code and supplementary video are publicly available at: https://zjchu.github.io/projects/CorrTalk/

Lianlian Liu, YongKang He, Zhaojie Chu et al.

Generating stylized 3D human motion from speech signals presents substantial challenges, primarily due to the intricate and fine-grained relationships among speech signals, individual styles, and the corresponding body movements. Current style encoding approaches either oversimplify stylistic diversity or ignore regional motion style differences (e.g., upper vs. lower body), limiting motion realism. Additionally, motion style should dynamically adapt to changes in speech rhythm and emotion, but existing methods often overlook this. To address these issues, we propose MimicParts, a novel framework designed to enhance stylized motion generation based on part-aware style injection and part-aware denoising network. It divides the body into different regions to encode localized motion styles, enabling the model to capture fine-grained regional differences. Furthermore, our part-aware attention block allows rhythm and emotion cues to guide each body region precisely, ensuring that the generated motion aligns with variations in speech rhythm and emotional state. Experimental results show that our method outperforming existing methods showcasing naturalness and expressive 3D human motion sequences.