ProbTalk3D: Non-Deterministic Emotion Controllable Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation Synthesis Using VQ-VAE

Audio-driven 3D facial animation synthesis has been an active field of research with attention from both academia and industry. While there are promising results in this area, recent approaches largely focus on lip-sync and identity control, neglecting the role of emotions and emotion control in the generative process. That is mainly due to the lack of emotionally rich facial animation data and algorithms that can synthesize speech animations with emotional expressions at the same time. In addition, majority of the models are deterministic, meaning given the same audio input, they produce the same output motion. We argue that emotions and non-determinism are crucial to generate diverse and emotionally-rich facial animations. In this paper, we propose ProbTalk3D a non-deterministic neural network approach for emotion controllable speech-driven 3D facial animation synthesis using a two-stage VQ-VAE model and an emotionally rich facial animation dataset 3DMEAD. We provide an extensive comparative analysis of our model against the recent 3D facial animation synthesis approaches, by evaluating the results objectively, qualitatively, and with a perceptual user study. We highlight several objective metrics that are more suitable for evaluating stochastic outputs and use both in-the-wild and ground truth data for subjective evaluation. To our knowledge, that is the first non-deterministic 3D facial animation synthesis method incorporating a rich emotion dataset and emotion control with emotion labels and intensity levels. Our evaluation demonstrates that the proposed model achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art emotion-controlled, deterministic and non-deterministic models. We recommend watching the supplementary video for quality judgement. The entire codebase is publicly available (https://github.com/uuembodiedsocialai/ProbTalk3D/).

FaceDiffuser: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation Synthesis Using Diffusion

Speech-driven 3D facial animation synthesis has been a challenging task both in industry and research. Recent methods mostly focus on deterministic deep learning methods meaning that given a speech input, the output is always the same. However, in reality, the non-verbal facial cues that reside throughout the face are non-deterministic in nature. In addition, majority of the approaches focus on 3D vertex based datasets and methods that are compatible with existing facial animation pipelines with rigged characters is scarce. To eliminate these issues, we present FaceDiffuser, a non-deterministic deep learning model to generate speech-driven facial animations that is trained with both 3D vertex and blendshape based datasets. Our method is based on the diffusion technique and uses the pre-trained large speech representation model HuBERT to encode the audio input. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to employ the diffusion method for the task of speech-driven 3D facial animation synthesis. We have run extensive objective and subjective analyses and show that our approach achieves better or comparable results in comparison to the state-of-the-art methods. We also introduce a new in-house dataset that is based on a blendshape based rigged character. We recommend watching the accompanying supplementary video. The code and the dataset will be publicly available.

FaceXHuBERT: Text-less Speech-driven E(X)pressive 3D Facial Animation Synthesis Using Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning

This paper presents FaceXHuBERT, a text-less speech-driven 3D facial animation generation method that allows to capture personalized and subtle cues in speech (e.g. identity, emotion and hesitation). It is also very robust to background noise and can handle audio recorded in a variety of situations (e.g. multiple people speaking). Recent approaches employ end-to-end deep learning taking into account both audio and text as input to generate facial animation for the whole face. However, scarcity of publicly available expressive audio-3D facial animation datasets poses a major bottleneck. The resulting animations still have issues regarding accurate lip-synching, expressivity, person-specific information and generalizability. We effectively employ self-supervised pretrained HuBERT model in the training process that allows us to incorporate both lexical and non-lexical information in the audio without using a large lexicon. Additionally, guiding the training with a binary emotion condition and speaker identity distinguishes the tiniest subtle facial motion. We carried out extensive objective and subjective evaluation in comparison to ground-truth and state-of-the-art work. A perceptual user study demonstrates that our approach produces superior results with respect to the realism of the animation 78% of the time in comparison to the state-of-the-art. In addition, our method is 4 times faster eliminating the use of complex sequential models such as transformers. We strongly recommend watching the supplementary video before reading the paper. We also provide the implementation and evaluation codes with a GitHub repository link.