Learning Motion Refinement for Unsupervised Face Animation

Jiale Tao, Shuhang Gu, Wen Li, Lixin Duan

Keywords: Face animation, Motion refinement, Structure correlation

Abstract:

Unsupervised face animation aims to generate a human face video based on the
appearance of a source image, mimicking the motion from a driving video. Existing
methods typically adopted a prior-based motion model (e.g., the local affine motion
model or the local thin-plate-spline motion model). While it is able to capture
the coarse facial motion, artifacts can often be observed around the tiny motion
in local areas (e.g., lips and eyes), due to the limited ability of these methods
to model the finer facial motions. In this work, we design a new unsupervised
face animation approach to learn simultaneously the coarse and finer motions. In
particular, while exploiting the local affine motion model to learn the global coarse
facial motion, we design a novel motion refinement module to compensate for
the local affine motion model for modeling finer face motions in local areas. The
motion refinement is learned from the dense correlation between the source and
driving images. Specifically, we first construct a structure correlation volume based
on the keypoint features of the source and driving images. Then, we train a model
to generate the tiny facial motions iteratively from low to high resolution. The
learned motion refinements are combined with the coarse motion to generate the
new image. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that
our method achieves the best results among state-of-the-art baselines.

Submission Number: 1156