Iterative Text-based Editing of Talking-heads Using Neural Retargeting

We present a text-based tool for editing talking-head video that enables an iterative editing workflow. On each iteration users can edit the wording of the speech, further refine mouth motions if necessary to reduce artifacts and manipulate non-verbal aspects of the performance by inserting mouth gestures (e.g. a smile) or changing the overall performance style (e.g. energetic, mumble). Our tool requires only 2-3 minutes of the target actor video and it synthesizes the video for each iteration in about 40 seconds, allowing users to quickly explore many editing possibilities as they iterate. Our approach is based on two key ideas. (1) We develop a fast phoneme search algorithm that can quickly identify phoneme-level subsequences of the source repository video that best match a desired edit. This enables our fast iteration loop. (2) We leverage a large repository of video of a source actor and develop a new self-supervised neural retargeting technique for transferring the mouth motions of the source actor to the target actor. This allows us to work with relatively short target actor videos, making our approach applicable in many real-world editing scenarios. Finally, our refinement and performance controls give users the ability to further fine-tune the synthesized results.

Rekall: Specifying Video Events using Compositions of Spatiotemporal Labels

Many real-world video analysis applications require the ability to identify domain-specific events in video, such as interviews and commercials in TV news broadcasts, or action sequences in film. Unfortunately, pre-trained models to detect all the events of interest in video may not exist, and training new models from scratch can be costly and labor-intensive. In this paper, we explore the utility of specifying new events in video in a more traditional manner: by writing queries that compose outputs of existing, pre-trained models. To write these queries, we have developed Rekall, a library that exposes a data model and programming model for compositional video event specification. Rekall represents video annotations from different sources (object detectors, transcripts, etc.) as spatiotemporal labels associated with continuous volumes of spacetime in a video, and provides operators for composing labels into queries that model new video events. We demonstrate the use of Rekall in analyzing video from cable TV news broadcasts, films, static-camera vehicular video streams, and commercial autonomous vehicle logs. In these efforts, domain experts were able to quickly (in a few hours to a day) author queries that enabled the accurate detection of new events (on par with, and in some cases much more accurate than, learned approaches) and to rapidly retrieve video clips for human-in-the-loop tasks such as video content curation and training data curation. Finally, in a user study, novice users of Rekall were able to author queries to retrieve new events in video given just one hour of query development time.

Deep Energies for Estimating Three-Dimensional Facial Pose and Expression

While much progress has been made in capturing high-quality facial performances using motion capture markers and shape-from-shading, high-end systems typically also rely on rotoscope curves hand-drawn on the image. These curves are subjective and difficult to draw consistently; moreover, ad-hoc procedural methods are required for generating matching rotoscope curves on synthetic renders embedded in the optimization used to determine three-dimensional facial pose and expression. We propose an alternative approach whereby these curves and other keypoints are detected automatically on both the image and the synthetic renders using trained neural networks, eliminating artist subjectivity and the ad-hoc procedures meant to mimic it. More generally, we propose using machine learning networks to implicitly define deep energies which when minimized using classical optimization techniques lead to three-dimensional facial pose and expression estimation.