Speech-Driven 3D Face Animation with Composite and Regional Facial
  Movements
Haozhe Wu Songtao Zhou Jia Jia Junliang Xing Qi Wen Xiang Wen
Speech-driven 3D face animation poses significant challenges due to the
intricacy and variability inherent in human facial movements. This paper
emphasizes the importance of considering both the composite and regional
natures of facial movements in speech-driven 3D face animation. The composite
nature pertains to how speech-independent factors globally modulate
speech-driven facial movements along the temporal dimension. Meanwhile, the
regional nature alludes to the notion that facial movements are not globally
correlated but are actuated by local musculature along the spatial dimension.
It is thus indispensable to incorporate both natures for engendering vivid
animation. To address the composite nature, we introduce an adaptive modulation
module that employs arbitrary facial movements to dynamically adjust
speech-driven facial movements across frames on a global scale. To accommodate
the regional nature, our approach ensures that each constituent of the facial
features for every frame focuses on the local spatial movements of 3D faces.
Moreover, we present a non-autoregressive backbone for translating audio to 3D
facial movements, which maintains high-frequency nuances of facial movements
and facilitates efficient inference. Comprehensive experiments and user studies
demonstrate that our method surpasses contemporary state-of-the-art approaches
both qualitatively and quantitatively.