High-fidelity Generalized Emotional Talking Face Generation with Multi-modal Emotion Space Learning
This work addresses the need for more adaptable and realistic emotional talking face generation in applications like virtual avatars or entertainment, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of generating emotional talking faces with flexible control and generalization to unseen emotion styles, achieving high-fidelity results through a multi-modal emotion space learning framework.
Recently, emotional talking face generation has received considerable attention. However, existing methods only adopt one-hot coding, image, or audio as emotion conditions, thus lacking flexible control in practical applications and failing to handle unseen emotion styles due to limited semantics. They either ignore the one-shot setting or the quality of generated faces. In this paper, we propose a more flexible and generalized framework. Specifically, we supplement the emotion style in text prompts and use an Aligned Multi-modal Emotion encoder to embed the text, image, and audio emotion modality into a unified space, which inherits rich semantic prior from CLIP. Consequently, effective multi-modal emotion space learning helps our method support arbitrary emotion modality during testing and could generalize to unseen emotion styles. Besides, an Emotion-aware Audio-to-3DMM Convertor is proposed to connect the emotion condition and the audio sequence to structural representation. A followed style-based High-fidelity Emotional Face generator is designed to generate arbitrary high-resolution realistic identities. Our texture generator hierarchically learns flow fields and animated faces in a residual manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the flexibility and generalization of our method in emotion control and the effectiveness of high-quality face synthesis.