One Paper has been accepted to WACV 2024
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2024 is the premier international computer vision event comprising the main conference and several co-located workshops and tutorials.
Title: LaughTalk: Expressive 3D Talking Head Generation with Laughter
Authors: Kim Sung-Bin (POSTECH), Lee Hyun (POSTECH), Da hye Hong (Sookmyung Women's University), Suekyeong Nam (KRAFTON), Janghoon Ju (KRAFTON), Tae-Hyun Oh (POSTECH)
Laughter is a unique expression, essential to affirmative social interactions of humans. Although current 3D talking head generation methods produce convincing verbal articulations, they often fail to capture the vitality and subtleties of laughter and smiles despite their importance in context. In this paper, we introduce a novel task to generate 3D talking heads capable of both articulate speech and authentic laughter. Our newly curated dataset comprises 2D laughing videos paired with pseudo-annotated and human-validated 3D FLAME parameters and vertices. Given our proposed dataset, we present a strong baseline with a two-stage training scheme: the model first learns to talk and then acquires the ability to express laughter. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method performs favorably compared to existing approaches in both talking head generation and expressing laughter signals. We further explore potential applications on top of our proposed method for rigging realistic avatars.
