Talking-Head Generation with Rhythmic Head Motion

Abstract

When people deliver a speech, they naturally move heads, and this rhythmic head motion conveys linguistic information. However, generating a lip-synced video while moving head naturally is challenging. While remarkably successful, existing works either generate still talking-face videos or rely on landmark/video frames as sparse/dense mapping guidance to generate head movements, which leads to unrealistic or uncontrollable video synthesis. To overcome the limitations, we propose a 3D-aware generative network along with a hybrid embedding module and a non-linear composition module. Through modeling the head motion and facial expressions explicitly, manipulating 3D animation carefully, and embedding reference images dynamically, our approach achieves controllable, photorealistic, and temporally coherent talking-head videos with natural head movements. Thoughtful experiments on several standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves significantly better results than the state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative comparisons. The code is available on https://github.com/lelechen63/Talking-head-Generation-with-Rhythmic-Head-Motion