FaceXHuBERT: Text-less Speech-driven E(X)pressive 3D Facial Animation Synthesis Using Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning
This work improves speech-driven facial animation for applications like virtual avatars or entertainment by enhancing realism and efficiency, though it is incremental as it builds on existing self-supervised methods.
The paper tackles the problem of generating expressive 3D facial animations from speech without text, addressing issues like lip-syncing and generalizability, and achieves superior realism 78% of the time compared to state-of-the-art methods while being 4 times faster.
This paper presents FaceXHuBERT, a text-less speech-driven 3D facial animation generation method that allows to capture personalized and subtle cues in speech (e.g. identity, emotion and hesitation). It is also very robust to background noise and can handle audio recorded in a variety of situations (e.g. multiple people speaking). Recent approaches employ end-to-end deep learning taking into account both audio and text as input to generate facial animation for the whole face. However, scarcity of publicly available expressive audio-3D facial animation datasets poses a major bottleneck. The resulting animations still have issues regarding accurate lip-synching, expressivity, person-specific information and generalizability. We effectively employ self-supervised pretrained HuBERT model in the training process that allows us to incorporate both lexical and non-lexical information in the audio without using a large lexicon. Additionally, guiding the training with a binary emotion condition and speaker identity distinguishes the tiniest subtle facial motion. We carried out extensive objective and subjective evaluation in comparison to ground-truth and state-of-the-art work. A perceptual user study demonstrates that our approach produces superior results with respect to the realism of the animation 78% of the time in comparison to the state-of-the-art. In addition, our method is 4 times faster eliminating the use of complex sequential models such as transformers. We strongly recommend watching the supplementary video before reading the paper. We also provide the implementation and evaluation codes with a GitHub repository link.