MMHead: Towards Fine-grained Multi-modal 3D Facial Animation

3D facial animation has attracted considerable attention due to its extensive applications in the multimedia field. Audio-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored with promising results. However, multi-modal 3D facial animation, especially text-guided 3D facial animation is rarely explored due to the lack of multi-modal 3D facial animation dataset. To fill this gap, we first construct a large-scale multi-modal 3D facial animation dataset, MMHead, which consists of 49 hours of 3D facial motion sequences, speech audios, and rich hierarchical text annotations. Each text annotation contains abstract action and emotion descriptions, fine-grained facial and head movements (i.e., expression and head pose) descriptions, and three possible scenarios that may cause such emotion. Concretely, we integrate five public 2D portrait video datasets, and propose an automatic pipeline to 1) reconstruct 3D facial motion sequences from monocular videos; and 2) obtain hierarchical text annotations with the help of AU detection and ChatGPT. Based on the MMHead dataset, we establish benchmarks for two new tasks: text-induced 3D talking head animation and text-to-3D facial motion generation. Moreover, a simple but efficient VQ-VAE-based method named MM2Face is proposed to unify the multi-modal information and generate diverse and plausible 3D facial motions, which achieves competitive results on both benchmarks. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analysis demonstrate the significant potential of our dataset and benchmarks in promoting the development of multi-modal 3D facial animation.

3DFacePolicy: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Diffusion Policy

Audio-driven 3D facial animation has made immersive progress both in research and application developments. The newest approaches focus on Transformer-based methods and diffusion-based methods, however, there is still gap in the vividness and emotional expression between the generated animation and real human face. To tackle this limitation, we propose 3DFacePolicy, a diffusion policy model for 3D facial animation prediction. This method generates variable and realistic human facial movements by predicting the 3D vertex trajectory on the 3D facial template with diffusion policy instead of facial generation for every frame. It takes audio and vertex states as observations to predict the vertex trajectory and imitate real human facial expressions, which keeps the continuous and natural flow of human emotions. The experiments show that our approach is effective in variable and dynamic facial motion synthesizing.

Emo3D: Metric and Benchmarking Dataset for 3D Facial Expression Generation from Emotion Description

Existing 3D facial emotion modeling have been constrained by limited emotion classes and insufficient datasets. This paper introduces "Emo3D", an extensive "Text-Image-Expression dataset" spanning a wide spectrum of human emotions, each paired with images and 3D blendshapes. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), we generate a diverse array of textual descriptions, facilitating the capture of a broad spectrum of emotional expressions. Using this unique dataset, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of language-based models' fine-tuning and vision-language models like Contranstive Language Image Pretraining (CLIP) for 3D facial expression synthesis. We also introduce a new evaluation metric for this task to more directly measure the conveyed emotion. Our new evaluation metric, Emo3D, demonstrates its superiority over Mean Squared Error (MSE) metrics in assessing visual-text alignment and semantic richness in 3D facial expressions associated with human emotions. "Emo3D" has great applications in animation design, virtual reality, and emotional human-computer interaction.

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/).

FaceLift: Semi-supervised 3D Facial Landmark Localization

3D facial landmark localization has proven to be of particular use for applications, such as face tracking, 3D face modeling, and image-based 3D face reconstruction. In the supervised learning case, such methods usually rely on 3D landmark datasets derived from 3DMM-based registration that often lack spatial definition alignment, as compared with that chosen by hand-labeled human consensus, e.g., how are eyebrow landmarks defined? This creates a gap between landmark datasets generated via high-quality 2D human labels and 3DMMs, and it ultimately limits their effectiveness. To address this issue, we introduce a novel semi-supervised learning approach that learns 3D landmarks by directly lifting (visible) hand-labeled 2D landmarks and ensures better definition alignment, without the need for 3D landmark datasets. To lift 2D landmarks to 3D, we leverage 3D-aware GANs for better multi-view consistency learning and in-the-wild multi-frame videos for robust cross-generalization. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our method not only achieves better definition alignment between 2D-3D landmarks but also outperforms other supervised learning 3D landmark localization methods on both 3DMM labeled and photogrammetric ground truth evaluation datasets. Project Page: https://davidcferman.github.io/FaceLift

KMTalk: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Key Motion Embedding

We present a novel approach for synthesizing 3D facial motions from audio sequences using key motion embeddings. Despite recent advancements in data-driven techniques, accurately mapping between audio signals and 3D facial meshes remains challenging. Direct regression of the entire sequence often leads to over-smoothed results due to the ill-posed nature of the problem. To this end, we propose a progressive learning mechanism that generates 3D facial animations by introducing key motion capture to decrease cross-modal mapping uncertainty and learning complexity. Concretely, our method integrates linguistic and data-driven priors through two modules: the linguistic-based key motion acquisition and the cross-modal motion completion. The former identifies key motions and learns the associated 3D facial expressions, ensuring accurate lip-speech synchronization. The latter extends key motions into a full sequence of 3D talking faces guided by audio features, improving temporal coherence and audio-visual consistency. Extensive experimental comparisons against existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of our approach in generating more vivid and consistent talking face animations. Consistent enhancements in results through the integration of our proposed learning scheme with existing methods underscore the efficacy of our approach. Our code and weights will be at the project website: \url{https://github.com/ffxzh/KMTalk}.

EmoDiffusion: Enhancing Emotional 3D Facial Animation with Latent Diffusion Models

Speech-driven 3D facial animation seeks to produce lifelike facial expressions that are synchronized with the speech content and its emotional nuances, finding applications in various multimedia fields. However, previous methods often overlook emotional facial expressions or fail to disentangle them effectively from the speech content. To address these challenges, we present EmoDiffusion, a novel approach that disentangles different emotions in speech to generate rich 3D emotional facial expressions. Specifically, our method employs two Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to separately generate the upper face region and mouth region, thereby learning a more refined representation of the facial sequence. Unlike traditional methods that use diffusion models to connect facial expression sequences with audio inputs, we perform the diffusion process in the latent space. Furthermore, we introduce an Emotion Adapter to evaluate upper face movements accurately. Given the paucity of 3D emotional talking face data in the animation industry, we capture facial expressions under the guidance of animation experts using LiveLinkFace on an iPhone. This effort results in the creation of an innovative 3D blendshape emotional talking face dataset (3D-BEF) used to train our network. Extensive experiments and perceptual evaluations validate the effectiveness of our approach, confirming its superiority in generating realistic and emotionally rich facial animations.

Enhancing Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Audio-Visual Guidance from Lip Reading Expert

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has recently garnered attention due to its cost-effective usability in multimedia production. However, most current advances overlook the intelligibility of lip movements, limiting the realism of facial expressions. In this paper, we introduce a method for speech-driven 3D facial animation to generate accurate lip movements, proposing an audio-visual multimodal perceptual loss. This loss provides guidance to train the speech-driven 3D facial animators to generate plausible lip motions aligned with the spoken transcripts. Furthermore, to incorporate the proposed audio-visual perceptual loss, we devise an audio-visual lip reading expert leveraging its prior knowledge about correlations between speech and lip motions. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through broad experiments, showing noticeable improvements in lip synchronization and lip readability performance. Codes are available at https://3d-talking-head-avguide.github.io/.

DrFER: Learning Disentangled Representations for 3D Facial Expression Recognition

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) has consistently been a focal point in the field of facial analysis. In the context of existing methodologies for 3D FER or 2D+3D FER, the extraction of expression features often gets entangled with identity information, compromising the distinctiveness of these features. To tackle this challenge, we introduce the innovative DrFER method, which brings the concept of disentangled representation learning to the field of 3D FER. DrFER employs a dual-branch framework to effectively disentangle expression information from identity information. Diverging from prior disentanglement endeavors in the 3D facial domain, we have carefully reconfigured both the loss functions and network structure to make the overall framework adaptable to point cloud data. This adaptation enhances the capability of the framework in recognizing facial expressions, even in cases involving varying head poses. Extensive evaluations conducted on the BU-3DFE and Bosphorus datasets substantiate that DrFER surpasses the performance of other 3D FER methods.

A 3D Facial Reconstruction Evaluation Methodology: Comparing Smartphone Scans with Deep Learning Based Methods Using Geometry and Morphometry Criteria

Three-dimensional (3D) facial shape analysis has gained interest due to its potential clinical applications. However, the high cost of advanced 3D facial acquisition systems limits their widespread use, driving the development of low-cost acquisition and reconstruction methods. This study introduces a novel evaluation methodology that goes beyond traditional geometry-based benchmarks by integrating morphometric shape analysis techniques, providing a statistical framework for assessing facial morphology preservation. As a case study, we compare smartphone-based 3D scans with state-of-the-art deep learning reconstruction methods from 2D images, using high-end stereophotogrammetry models as ground truth. This methodology enables a quantitative assessment of global and local shape differences, offering a biologically meaningful validation approach for low-cost 3D facial acquisition and reconstruction techniques.