NeRFFaceSpeech: One-shot Audio-driven 3D Talking Head Synthesis via Generative Prior

Audio-driven talking head generation is advancing from 2D to 3D content. Notably, Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) is in the spotlight as a means to synthesize high-quality 3D talking head outputs. Unfortunately, this NeRF-based approach typically requires a large number of paired audio-visual data for each identity, thereby limiting the scalability of the method. Although there have been attempts to generate audio-driven 3D talking head animations with a single image, the results are often unsatisfactory due to insufficient information on obscured regions in the image. In this paper, we mainly focus on addressing the overlooked aspect of 3D consistency in the one-shot, audio-driven domain, where facial animations are synthesized primarily in front-facing perspectives. We propose a novel method, NeRFFaceSpeech, which enables to produce high-quality 3D-aware talking head. Using prior knowledge of generative models combined with NeRF, our method can craft a 3D-consistent facial feature space corresponding to a single image. Our spatial synchronization method employs audio-correlated vertex dynamics of a parametric face model to transform static image features into dynamic visuals through ray deformation, ensuring realistic 3D facial motion. Moreover, we introduce LipaintNet that can replenish the lacking information in the inner-mouth area, which can not be obtained from a given single image. The network is trained in a self-supervised manner by utilizing the generative capabilities without additional data. The comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in generating audio-driven talking heads from a single image with enhanced 3D consistency compared to previous approaches. In addition, we introduce a quantitative way of measuring the robustness of a model against pose changes for the first time, which has been possible only qualitatively.

LeGO: Leveraging a Surface Deformation Network for Animatable Stylized Face Generation with One Example

Recent advances in 3D face stylization have made significant strides in few to zero-shot settings. However, the degree of stylization achieved by existing methods is often not sufficient for practical applications because they are mostly based on statistical 3D Morphable Models (3DMM) with limited variations. To this end, we propose a method that can produce a highly stylized 3D face model with desired topology. Our methods train a surface deformation network with 3DMM and translate its domain to the target style using a paired exemplar. The network achieves stylization of the 3D face mesh by mimicking the style of the target using a differentiable renderer and directional CLIP losses. Additionally, during the inference process, we utilize a Mesh Agnostic Encoder (MAGE) that takes deformation target, a mesh of diverse topologies as input to the stylization process and encodes its shape into our latent space. The resulting stylized face model can be animated by commonly used 3DMM blend shapes. A set of quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our method can produce highly stylized face meshes according to a given style and output them in a desired topology. We also demonstrate example applications of our method including image-based stylized avatar generation, linear interpolation of geometric styles, and facial animation of stylized avatars.

Generating Texture for 3D Human Avatar from a Single Image using Sampling and Refinement Networks

There has been significant progress in generating an animatable 3D human avatar from a single image. However, recovering texture for the 3D human avatar from a single image has been relatively less addressed. Because the generated 3D human avatar reveals the occluded texture of the given image as it moves, it is critical to synthesize the occluded texture pattern that is unseen from the source image. To generate a plausible texture map for 3D human avatars, the occluded texture pattern needs to be synthesized with respect to the visible texture from the given image. Moreover, the generated texture should align with the surface of the target 3D mesh. In this paper, we propose a texture synthesis method for a 3D human avatar that incorporates geometry information. The proposed method consists of two convolutional networks for the sampling and refining process. The sampler network fills in the occluded regions of the source image and aligns the texture with the surface of the target 3D mesh using the geometry information. The sampled texture is further refined and adjusted by the refiner network. To maintain the clear details in the given image, both sampled and refined texture is blended to produce the final texture map. To effectively guide the sampler network to achieve its goal, we designed a curriculum learning scheme that starts from a simple sampling task and gradually progresses to the task where the alignment needs to be considered. We conducted experiments to show that our method outperforms previous methods qualitatively and quantitatively.