Sonic: Shifting Focus to Global Audio Perception in Portrait Animation
This addresses the issue of unnatural and inconsistent animations in talking face generation for applications like virtual avatars and video editing, representing a novel paradigm rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of generating talking face animations by shifting focus to global audio perception, proposing Sonic to enhance naturalness and temporal consistency without auxiliary visual signals, and demonstrates it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in video quality, lip synchronization, and motion diversity.
The study of talking face generation mainly explores the intricacies of synchronizing facial movements and crafting visually appealing, temporally-coherent animations. However, due to the limited exploration of global audio perception, current approaches predominantly employ auxiliary visual and spatial knowledge to stabilize the movements, which often results in the deterioration of the naturalness and temporal inconsistencies.Considering the essence of audio-driven animation, the audio signal serves as the ideal and unique priors to adjust facial expressions and lip movements, without resorting to interference of any visual signals. Based on this motivation, we propose a novel paradigm, dubbed as Sonic, to {s}hift f{o}cus on the exploration of global audio per{c}ept{i}o{n}.To effectively leverage global audio knowledge, we disentangle it into intra- and inter-clip audio perception and collaborate with both aspects to enhance overall perception.For the intra-clip audio perception, 1). \textbf{Context-enhanced audio learning}, in which long-range intra-clip temporal audio knowledge is extracted to provide facial expression and lip motion priors implicitly expressed as the tone and speed of speech. 2). \textbf{Motion-decoupled controller}, in which the motion of the head and expression movement are disentangled and independently controlled by intra-audio clips. Most importantly, for inter-clip audio perception, as a bridge to connect the intra-clips to achieve the global perception, \textbf{Time-aware position shift fusion}, in which the global inter-clip audio information is considered and fused for long-audio inference via through consecutively time-aware shifted windows. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the novel audio-driven paradigm outperform existing SOTA methodologies in terms of video quality, temporally consistency, lip synchronization precision, and motion diversity.