EMO2: End-Effector Guided Audio-Driven Avatar Video Generation
This work addresses the challenge of creating natural and expressive talking head animations for applications in virtual avatars and human-computer interaction, though it is incremental in focusing on hand gestures rather than full-body generation.
The paper tackles the problem of generating expressive facial expressions and hand gestures in audio-driven talking head videos by proposing a two-stage method that first generates hand poses from audio and then synthesizes video frames with a diffusion model. The method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches like CyberHost and Vlogger in visual quality and synchronization accuracy.
In this paper, we propose a novel audio-driven talking head method capable of simultaneously generating highly expressive facial expressions and hand gestures. Unlike existing methods that focus on generating full-body or half-body poses, we investigate the challenges of co-speech gesture generation and identify the weak correspondence between audio features and full-body gestures as a key limitation. To address this, we redefine the task as a two-stage process. In the first stage, we generate hand poses directly from audio input, leveraging the strong correlation between audio signals and hand movements. In the second stage, we employ a diffusion model to synthesize video frames, incorporating the hand poses generated in the first stage to produce realistic facial expressions and body movements. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, such as CyberHost and Vlogger, in terms of both visual quality and synchronization accuracy. This work provides a new perspective on audio-driven gesture generation and a robust framework for creating expressive and natural talking head animations.