Arbitrary Talking Face Generation via Attentional Audio-Visual Coherence Learning
This work improves talking face generation for applications like virtual avatars and video editing by enhancing lip synchronization and facial motion smoothness, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods by focusing on audio-visual coherence.
The paper tackles the problem of generating realistic talking face videos from speech and a single facial image by addressing cross-modality coherence between audio and video, using an Asymmetric Mutual Information Estimator and Dynamic Attention block, achieving state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets like LRW and GRID with robust performance across gender and pose variations.
Talking face generation aims to synthesize a face video with precise lip synchronization as well as a smooth transition of facial motion over the entire video via the given speech clip and facial image. Most existing methods mainly focus on either disentangling the information in a single image or learning temporal information between frames. However, cross-modality coherence between audio and video information has not been well addressed during synthesis. In this paper, we propose a novel arbitrary talking face generation framework by discovering the audio-visual coherence via the proposed Asymmetric Mutual Information Estimator (AMIE). In addition, we propose a Dynamic Attention (DA) block by selectively focusing the lip area of the input image during the training stage, to further enhance lip synchronization. Experimental results on benchmark LRW dataset and GRID dataset transcend the state-of-the-art methods on prevalent metrics with robust high-resolution synthesizing on gender and pose variations.