Talking Face Generation with Expression-Tailored Generative Adversarial Network

Abstract

A key of automatically generating vivid talking faces is to synthesize identity-preserving natural facial expressions beyond audio-lip synchronization, which usually need to disentangle the informative features from multiple modals and then fuse them together. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Expression-Tailored Generative Adversarial Network (ET-GAN) to generate an expression enriched talking face video of arbitrary identity. Different from talking face generation based on identity image and audio, an expressional video of arbitrary identity serves as the expression source in our approach. Expression encoder is proposed to disentangle expression-tailored representation from the guiding expressional video, while audio encoder disentangles audio-lip representation. Instead of using single image as identity input, multi-image identity encoder is proposed by learning different views of faces and merging a unified representation. Multiple discriminators are exploited to keep both image-aware and the video-aware realistic details, including a spatial-temporal discriminator for visual continuity of expression synthesis and facial movements. We conduct extensive experimental evaluations on quantitative metrics, expression retention quality and audio-visual synchronization. The results show the effectiveness of our ET-GAN in generating high quality expressional talking face videos against existing state-of-the-arts.