C V Jawahar

Madhav Agarwal, Rudrabha Mukhopadhyay, Vinay Namboodiri et al.

This work proposes a novel method to generate realistic talking head videos using audio and visual streams. We animate a source image by transferring head motion from a driving video using a dense motion field generated using learnable keypoints. We improve the quality of lip sync using audio as an additional input, helping the network to attend to the mouth region. We use additional priors using face segmentation and face mesh to improve the structure of the reconstructed faces. Finally, we improve the visual quality of the generations by incorporating a carefully designed identity-aware generator module. The identity-aware generator takes the source image and the warped motion features as input to generate a high-quality output with fine-grained details. Our method produces state-of-the-art results and generalizes well to unseen faces, languages, and voices. We comprehensively evaluate our approach using multiple metrics and outperforming the current techniques both qualitative and quantitatively. Our work opens up several applications, including enabling low bandwidth video calls. We release a demo video and additional information at http://cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/cvit-projects/avfr.

Madhav Agarwal, Anchit Gupta, Rudrabha Mukhopadhyay et al.

We leverage the modern advancements in talking head generation to propose an end-to-end system for talking head video compression. Our algorithm transmits pivot frames intermittently while the rest of the talking head video is generated by animating them. We use a state-of-the-art face reenactment network to detect key points in the non-pivot frames and transmit them to the receiver. A dense flow is then calculated to warp a pivot frame to reconstruct the non-pivot ones. Transmitting key points instead of full frames leads to significant compression. We propose a novel algorithm to adaptively select the best-suited pivot frames at regular intervals to provide a smooth experience. We also propose a frame-interpolater at the receiver's end to improve the compression levels further. Finally, a face enhancement network improves reconstruction quality, significantly improving several aspects like the sharpness of the generations. We evaluate our method both qualitatively and quantitatively on benchmark datasets and compare it with multiple compression techniques. We release a demo video and additional information at https://cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/cvit-projects/talking-video-compression.