Neural Style-Preserving Visual Dubbing

Research
CAMERA Neural Style-Preserving Visual Dubbing

CAMERA’s Co-Investigator, Christian Richardt’s collaborative paper ‘Neural Style-Preserving Visual Dubbing’ was presented at Siggraph Asia 2019 Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in November.

Abstract

Dubbing is a technique for translating video content from one language to another. However, state-of-the-art visual dubbing techniques directly copy facial expressions from source to target actors without considering identity-specifc idiosyncrasies such as a unique type of smile. We present a style-preserving visual dubbing approach from single video inputs, which maintains the signature style of target actors when modifying facial expressions, including mouth motions, to match foreign languages. At the heart of our approach is the concept of motion style, in particular for facial expressions, i.e., the person-specifc expression change that is yet another essential factor beyond visual accuracy in face editing applications. Our method is based on a recurrent generative adversarial network that captures the spatiotemporal co-activation of facial expressions, and enables generating and modifying the facial expressions of the target actor while preserving their style. We train our model with unsynchronized source and target videos in an unsupervised manner using cycle-consistency and mouth expression losses, and synthesize photorealistic video frames using a layered neural face renderer. Our approach generates temporally coherent results, and handles dynamic backgrounds. Our results show that our dubbing approach maintains the idiosyncratic style of the target actor better than previous approaches, even for widely differing source and target actors.

 

 

Paper

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.02518.pdf

Authors

HYEONGWOO KIM, Max Planck Institute for Informatics

MOHAMED ELGHARIB, Max Planck Institute for Informatics

MICHAEL ZOLLHÖFER, Stanford University

HANS-PETER SEIDEL, Max Planck Institute for Informatics

THABO BEELER, DisneyResearch|Studios

CHRISTIAN RICHARDT, University of Bath

CHRISTIAN THEOBALT, Max Planck Institute for Informatics

Keep Up To Date?

Join Our Centre Newsletter