Ziyang Zhang

Zhiyao Sun, Yu-Hui Wen, Tian Lv et al.

Recently audio-driven talking face video generation has attracted considerable attention. However, very few researches address the issue of emotional editing of these talking face videos with continuously controllable expressions, which is a strong demand in the industry. The challenge is that speech-related expressions and emotion-related expressions are often highly coupled. Meanwhile, traditional image-to-image translation methods cannot work well in our application due to the coupling of expressions with other attributes such as poses, i.e., translating the expression of the character in each frame may simultaneously change the head pose due to the bias of the training data distribution. In this paper, we propose a high-quality facial expression editing method for talking face videos, allowing the user to control the target emotion in the edited video continuously. We present a new perspective for this task as a special case of motion information editing, where we use a 3DMM to capture major facial movements and an associated texture map modeled by a StyleGAN to capture appearance details. Both representations (3DMM and texture map) contain emotional information and can be continuously modified by neural networks and easily smoothed by averaging in coefficient/latent spaces, making our method simple yet effective. We also introduce a mouth shape preservation loss to control the trade-off between lip synchronization and the degree of exaggeration of the edited expression. Extensive experiments and a user study show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various evaluation criteria.

Ziyang Zhang, Liuwei An, Zishun Cui et al.

In this paper, we present our solutions for the 5th Workshop and Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW), which includes four sub-challenges of Valence-Arousal (VA) Estimation, Expression (Expr) Classification, Action Unit (AU) Detection and Emotional Reaction Intensity (ERI) Estimation. The 5th ABAW competition focuses on facial affect recognition utilizing different modalities and datasets. In our work, we extract powerful audio and visual features using a large number of sota models. These features are fused by Transformer Encoder and TEMMA. Besides, to avoid the possible impact of large dimensional differences between various features, we design an Affine Module to align different features to the same dimension. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the superiority of the proposed method. For the VA Estimation sub-challenge, our method obtains the mean Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) of 0.6066. For the Expression Classification sub-challenge, the average F1 Score is 0.4055. For the AU Detection sub-challenge, the average F1 Score is 0.5296. For the Emotional Reaction Intensity Estimation sub-challenge, the average pearson's correlations coefficient on the validation set is 0.3968. All of the results of four sub-challenges outperform the baseline with a large margin.

Song Wu, Kaichao You, Weihua He et al.

Video frame interpolation is a challenging task due to the ever-changing real-world scene. Previous methods often calculate the bi-directional optical flows and then predict the intermediate optical flows under the linear motion assumptions, leading to isotropic intermediate flow generation. Follow-up research obtained anisotropic adjustment through estimated higher-order motion information with extra frames. Based on the motion assumptions, their methods are hard to model the complicated motion in real scenes. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end training method A^2OF for video frame interpolation with event-driven Anisotropic Adjustment of Optical Flows. Specifically, we use events to generate optical flow distribution masks for the intermediate optical flow, which can model the complicated motion between two frames. Our proposed method outperforms the previous methods in video frame interpolation, taking supervised event-based video interpolation to a higher stage.