# GANimate: Ultra-Efficient Lip-Landmark-Driven Talking Face Animation Using a Learned Kalman Filter on GAN Feature Latent Space for Human–Computer Interaction on Mobile Devices

**Authors:** Ethan Fenakel, Ben Ohayon, Dan Raviv

PMC · DOI: 10.3390/s26041377 · Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026-02-22

## TL;DR

GANimate is a lightweight method for creating realistic talking face animations on mobile devices using GANs and lip landmarks.

## Contribution

GANimate introduces a compact and efficient framework for talking face animation using a learned Kalman filter in GAN latent space.

## Key findings

- GANimate produces realistic and expressive lip movements with minimal computational resources.
- The use of a Kalman filter improves temporal consistency and visual coherence in animations.
- The framework is modular and easily integrable with any lip-landmark generator.

## Abstract

We present GANimate, a lightweight method for animating talking faces that leverages recent advances in latent-space manipulation of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Unlike existing approaches based on computationally intensive diffusion models, transformers, or complex 3DMM representations, which are impractical for mobile and other low-resource edge devices due to high memory and compute demands, GANimate is designed for efficient operation on low-memory, low-compute edge devices. The model operates on 2D lip landmarks extracted from standard mobile vision-sensor inputs and requires no pre-training, making it easily integrable with any lip-landmark generator. Through an optimization process in the GAN feature latent space, these landmarks act as geometric constraints to animate a static portrait, producing realistic and expressive lip movements. To maintain stability and visual coherence across frames, we employ a Kalman filter to detect and track lip landmarks during video synthesis, enabling adaptive refinement and improved temporal consistency. The result is a compact and modular framework that bridges the gap between performance and accessibility in talking face synthesis, delivering high-quality and stable animations with minimal computational overhead. GANimate represents an important step toward lifelike, real-time avatars suitable for sensor-enabled and mobile human–computer interaction.

## Full-text entities

- **Diseases:** CSIM (MESH:C536318), mouth deformations (MESH:D009059), injury to (MESH:D014947)
- **Chemicals:** GANimate (-)
- **Species:** Homo sapiens (human, species) [taxon 9606]

## Full text

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## Figures

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## References

78 references — full list in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12944662/full.md

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/PMC12944662