Speech-Driven 3D Face Animation with Composite and Regional Facial Movements
It addresses the problem of creating more vivid and accurate speech-driven animations for applications like virtual avatars or entertainment, representing an incremental improvement by refining existing methods with new modules.
This paper tackles the challenge of generating realistic 3D face animations from speech by modeling both composite (global temporal) and regional (local spatial) facial movements, resulting in a method that outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in experiments and user studies.
Speech-driven 3D face animation poses significant challenges due to the intricacy and variability inherent in human facial movements. This paper emphasizes the importance of considering both the composite and regional natures of facial movements in speech-driven 3D face animation. The composite nature pertains to how speech-independent factors globally modulate speech-driven facial movements along the temporal dimension. Meanwhile, the regional nature alludes to the notion that facial movements are not globally correlated but are actuated by local musculature along the spatial dimension. It is thus indispensable to incorporate both natures for engendering vivid animation. To address the composite nature, we introduce an adaptive modulation module that employs arbitrary facial movements to dynamically adjust speech-driven facial movements across frames on a global scale. To accommodate the regional nature, our approach ensures that each constituent of the facial features for every frame focuses on the local spatial movements of 3D faces. Moreover, we present a non-autoregressive backbone for translating audio to 3D facial movements, which maintains high-frequency nuances of facial movements and facilitates efficient inference. Comprehensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that our method surpasses contemporary state-of-the-art approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively.