Audio-Visual Face Reenactment

This work proposes a novel method to generate realistic talking head videos using audio and visual streams. We animate a source image by transferring head motion from a driving video using a dense motion field generated using learnable keypoints. We improve the quality of lip sync using audio as an additional input, helping the network to attend to the mouth region. We use additional priors using face segmentation and face mesh to improve the structure of the reconstructed faces. Finally, we improve the visual quality of the generations by incorporating a carefully designed identity-aware generator module. The identity-aware generator takes the source image and the warped motion features as input to generate a high-quality output with fine-grained details. Our method produces state-of-the-art results and generalizes well to unseen faces, languages, and voices. We comprehensively evaluate our approach using multiple metrics and outperforming the current techniques both qualitative and quantitatively. Our work opens up several applications, including enabling low bandwidth video calls. We release a demo video and additional information at http://cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/cvit-projects/avfr.

1. Introduction

Imagine your favorite celebrity giving daily news updates, motivating you to work out, or interacting with you on your mobile phone! What if a movie director could reenact an actor’s image without actually recording the actor? Or, how about skilled content creators animating avatars in a metaverse to follow an actor’s head movements and expressions in great detail? We can also reduce zoom fatigue [11] by animating a well-dressed image of ourselves in a video call without transmitting a live video stream! These ideas seem fictitious, infeasible, and not scalable. But, how about animating or “reenacting” a single image of any person according to a driving video of someone else? Face reenactment, thus, opens up many opportunities in a world that is becoming increasingly digital with each passing day.