Wolfgang Paier

Wolfgang Paier, Anna Hilsmann, Peter Eisert

This paper presents a novel approach for text/speech-driven animation of a photo-realistic head model based on blend-shape geometry, dynamic textures, and neural rendering. Training a VAE for geometry and texture yields a parametric model for accurate capturing and realistic synthesis of facial expressions from a latent feature vector. Our animation method is based on a conditional CNN that transforms text or speech into a sequence of animation parameters. In contrast to previous approaches, our animation model learns disentangling/synthesizing different acting-styles in an unsupervised manner, requiring only phonetic labels that describe the content of training sequences. For realistic real-time rendering, we train a U-Net that refines rasterization-based renderings by computing improved pixel colors and a foreground matte. We compare our framework qualitatively/quantitatively against recent methods for head modeling as well as facial animation and evaluate the perceived rendering/animation quality in a user-study, which indicates large improvements compared to state-of-the-art approaches

John Flynn, Wolfgang Paier, Dimitar Dinev et al.

Current generative video models excel at producing novel content from text and image prompts, but leave a critical gap in editing existing pre-recorded videos, where minor alterations to the spoken script require preserving motion, temporal coherence, speaker identity, and accurate lip synchronization. We introduce EditYourself, a DiT-based framework for audio-driven video-to-video (V2V) editing that enables transcript-based modification of talking head videos, including the seamless addition, removal, and retiming of visually spoken content. Building on a general-purpose video diffusion model, EditYourself augments its V2V capabilities with audio conditioning and region-aware, edit-focused training extensions. This enables precise lip synchronization and temporally coherent restructuring of existing performances via spatiotemporal inpainting, including the synthesis of realistic human motion in newly added segments, while maintaining visual fidelity and identity consistency over long durations. This work represents a foundational step toward generative video models as practical tools for professional video post-production.

Wolfgang Paier, Paul Hinzer, Anna Hilsmann et al.

We present a new approach for video-driven animation of high-quality neural 3D head models, addressing the challenge of person-independent animation from video input. Typically, high-quality generative models are learned for specific individuals from multi-view video footage, resulting in person-specific latent representations that drive the generation process. In order to achieve person-independent animation from video input, we introduce an LSTM-based animation network capable of translating person-independent expression features into personalized animation parameters of person-specific 3D head models. Our approach combines the advantages of personalized head models (high quality and realism) with the convenience of video-driven animation employing multi-person facial performance capture. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on synthesized animations with high quality based on different source videos as well as an ablation study.

Wolfgang Paier, Anna Hilsmann, Peter Eisert

Creating realistic animations of human faces with computer graphic models is still a challenging task. It is often solved either with tedious manual work or motion capture based techniques that require specialised and costly hardware. Example based animation approaches circumvent these problems by re-using captured data of real people. This data is split into short motion samples that can be looped or concatenated in order to create novel motion sequences. The obvious advantages of this approach are the simplicity of use and the high realism, since the data exhibits only real deformations. Rather than tuning weights of a complex face rig, the animation task is performed on a higher level by arranging typical motion samples in a way such that the desired facial performance is achieved. Two difficulties with example based approaches, however, are high memory requirements as well as the creation of artefact-free and realistic transitions between motion samples. We solve these problems by combining the realism and simplicity of example-based animations with the advantages of neural face models. Our neural face model is capable of synthesising high quality 3D face geometry and texture according to a compact latent parameter vector. This latent representation reduces memory requirements by a factor of 100 and helps creating seamless transitions between concatenated motion samples. In this paper, we present a marker-less approach for facial motion capture based on multi-view video. Based on the captured data, we learn a neural representation of facial expressions, which is used to seamlessly concatenate facial performances during the animation procedure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by synthesising mouthings for Swiss-German sign language based on viseme query sequences.