Valeriya Strizhkova

Junuk Cha, Seongro Yoon, Valeriya Strizhkova et al.

3D Gaussian splatting-based talking head synthesis has recently gained attention for its ability to render high-fidelity images with real-time inference speed. However, since it is typically trained on only a short video that lacks the diversity in facial emotions, the resultant talking heads struggle to represent a wide range of emotions. To address this issue, we propose a lip-aligned emotional face generator and leverage it to train our EmoTalkingGaussian model. It is able to manipulate facial emotions conditioned on continuous emotion values (i.e., valence and arousal); while retaining synchronization of lip movements with input audio. Additionally, to achieve the accurate lip synchronization for in-the-wild audio, we introduce a self-supervised learning method that leverages a text-to-speech network and a visual-audio synchronization network. We experiment our EmoTalkingGaussian on publicly available videos and have obtained better results than state-of-the-arts in terms of image quality (measured in PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS), emotion expression (measured in V-RMSE, A-RMSE, V-SA, A-SA, Emotion Accuracy), and lip synchronization (measured in LMD, Sync-E, Sync-C), respectively.

Valeriya Strizhkova, Hadi Kachmar, Hava Chaptoukaev et al.

Human emotions entail a complex set of behavioral, physiological and cognitive changes. Current state-of-the-art models fuse the behavioral and physiological components using classic machine learning, rather than recent deep learning techniques. We propose to fill this gap, designing the Multimodal for Video and Physio (MVP) architecture, streamlined to fuse video and physiological signals. Differently then others approaches, MVP exploits the benefits of attention to enable the use of long input sequences (1-2 minutes). We have studied video and physiological backbones for inputting long sequences and evaluated our method with respect to the state-of-the-art. Our results show that MVP outperforms former methods for emotion recognition based on facial videos, EDA, and ECG/PPG.

Renat Bashirov, Anastasia Ianina, Karim Iskakov et al.

We present a system for real-time RGBD-based estimation of 3D human pose. We use parametric 3D deformable human mesh model (SMPL-X) as a representation and focus on the real-time estimation of parameters for the body pose, hands pose and facial expression from Kinect Azure RGB-D camera. We train estimators of body pose and facial expression parameters. Both estimators use previously published landmark extractors as input and custom annotated datasets for supervision, while hand pose is estimated directly by a previously published method. We combine the predictions of those estimators into a temporally-smooth human pose. We train the facial expression extractor on a large talking face dataset, which we annotate with facial expression parameters. For the body pose we collect and annotate a dataset of 56 people captured from a rig of 5 Kinect Azure RGB-D cameras and use it together with a large motion capture AMASS dataset. Our RGB-D body pose model outperforms the state-of-the-art RGB-only methods and works on the same level of accuracy compared to a slower RGB-D optimization-based solution. The combined system runs at 30 FPS on a server with a single GPU. The code will be available at https://saic-violet.github.io/rgbd-kinect-pose