Lip Movements Generation at a Glance

Lele Chen, Zhiheng Li, Ross K Maddox, Zhiyao Duan, Chenliang Xu; The European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 520-535

Cross-modality generation is an emerging topic that aims to synthesize data in one modality based on information in a different modality. In this paper, we consider a task of such: given an arbitrary audio speech and one lip image of arbitrary target identity, generate synthesized lip movements of the target identity saying the speech. To perform well in this task, it inevitably requires a model to not only consider the retention of target identity, photo-realistic of synthesized images, consistency and smoothness of lip images in a sequence, but more importantly, learn the correlations between audio speech and lip movements. To solve the collective problems, we explore the best modeling of the audio-visual correlations in building and training a lip-movement generator network. Specifically, we devise a method to fuse audio and image embeddings to generate multiple lip images at once and propose a novel correlation loss to synchronize lip changes and speech changes. Our final model utilizes a combination of four losses for a comprehensive consideration in generating lip movements; it is trained in an end-to-end fashion and is robust to lip shapes, view angles and different facial characteristics. Thoughtful experiments on three datasets ranging from lab-recorded to lips in the wild show that our model significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods extended to this task.