Flow-Guided One-Shot Talking Face Generation With a High-Resolution Audio-Visual Dataset

Zhimeng Zhang, Lincheng Li, Yu Ding, Changjie Fan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 3661-3670

One-shot talking face generation should synthesize high visual quality facial videos with reasonable animations of expression and head pose, and just utilize arbitrary driving audio and arbitrary single face image as the source. Current works fail to generate over 256 x 256 resolution realistic-looking videos due to the lack of an appropriate high-resolution audio-visual dataset, and the limitation of the sparse facial landmarks in providing poor expression details. To synthesize high-definition videos, we build a large in-the-wild high-resolution audio-visual dataset and propose a novel flow-guided talking face generation framework. The new dataset is collected from youtube and consists of about 16 hours 720P or 1080P videos. We leverage the facial 3D morphable model (3DMM) to split the framework into two cascaded modules instead of learning a direct mapping from audio to video. In the first module, we propose a novel animation generator to produce the movements of mouth, eyebrow and head pose simultaneously. In the second module, we transform animation into dense flow to provide more expression details and carefully design a novel flow-guided video generator to synthesize videos. Our method is able to produce high-definition videos and outperforms state-of-the-art works in objective and subjective comparisons.