SEEG: Semantic Energized Co-Speech Gesture Generation

Yuanzhi Liang, Qianyu Feng, Linchao Zhu, Li Hu, Pan Pan, Yi Yang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 10473-10482

Talking gesture generation is a practical yet challenging task which aims to synthesize gestures in line with speech. Gestures with meaningful signs can better convey useful information and arouse sympathy in the audience. Current works focus on aligning gestures with the speech rhythms, which are hard to mine the semantics and model semantic gestures explicitly. In this paper, we propose a novel method SEmantic Energized Generation (SEEG), for semantic-aware gesture generation. Our method contains two parts: DEcoupled Mining module (DEM) and Semantic Energizing Module (SEM). DEM decouples the semantic-irrelevant information from inputs and separately mines information for the beat and semantic gestures. SEM conducts semantic learning and produces semantic gestures. Apart from representational similarity, SEM requires the predictions to express the same semantics as the ground truth. Besides, a semantic prompter is designed in SEM to leverage the semantic-aware supervision to predictions. This promotes the networks to learn and generate semantic gestures. Experimental results reported in three metrics on different benchmarks prove that SEEG efficiently mines semantic cues and generates semantic gestures. In comparison, SEEG outperforms other methods in all semantic-aware evaluations on different datasets. Qualitative evaluations also indicate the superiority of SEEG in semantic expressiveness.