Everybody's Talkin': Let Me Talk as You Want

Linsen Song, Wayne Wu, Chen Qian, Ran He, Chen Change Loy*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

78 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We present a method to edit a target portrait footage by taking a sequence of audio as input to synthesize a photo-realistic video. This method is unique because it is highly dynamic. It does not assume a person-specific rendering network yet capable of translating one source audio into one random chosen video output within a set of speech videos. Instead of learning a highly heterogeneous and nonlinear mapping from audio to the video directly, we first factorize each target video frame into orthogonal parameter spaces, i.e., expression, geometry, and pose, via monocular 3D face reconstruction. Next, a recurrent network is introduced to translate source audio into expression parameters that are primarily related to the audio content. The audio-translated expression parameters are then used to synthesize a photo-realistic human subject in each video frame, with the movement of the mouth regions precisely mapped to the source audio. The geometry and pose parameters of the target human portrait are retained, therefore preserving the context of the original video footage. Finally, we introduce a novel video rendering network and a dynamic programming method to construct a temporally coherent and photo-realistic video. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing approaches. Our method is end-to-end learnable and robust to voice variations in the source audio.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)585-598
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Volume17
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2005-2012 IEEE.

ASJC Scopus Subject Areas

  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
  • Computer Networks and Communications

Keywords

  • audio dubbing
  • GAN
  • Talking face generation
  • video generation

Cite this