We present a method to edit a target portrait footage by taking a sequence of audio as input to synthesize a photo-realistic video. This method is unique because it is highly dynamic. It does not assume a person-specific rendering network yet capable of translating arbitrary source audio into arbitrary video output. Instead of learning a highly heterogeneous and nonlinear mapping from audio to the video directly, we first factorize each target video frame into orthogonal parameter spaces, i.e., expression, geometry, and pose, via monocular 3D face reconstruction. Next, a recurrent network is introduced to translate source audio into expression parameters that are primarily related to the audio content. The audio-translated expression parameters are then used to synthesize a photo-realistic human subject in each video frame, with the movement of the mouth regions precisely mapped to the source audio. The geometry and pose parameters of the target human portrait are retained, therefore preserving the context of the original video footage. Finally, we introduce a novel video rendering network and a dynamic programming method to construct a temporally coherent and photo-realistic video. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing approaches. Our method is end-to-end learnable and robust to voice variations in the source audio.

Everybody’s Talkin’: Let Me Talk as You Want Linsen Song, Wayne Wu, Chen Qian, Ran He, Chen Change Loy IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, TIFS 2022.