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

TL;DR

KMTalk introduces a progressive learning framework that uses key motion embeddings to synthesize realistic 3D facial animations from audio, improving lip synchronization and temporal coherence over previous methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel key motion embedding approach with a progressive learning scheme for more accurate and consistent 3D facial animation from audio signals.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods in realism and synchronization

Enhances temporal coherence in 3D facial animations

Demonstrates robustness across diverse speech datasets

Abstract

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}.