Facial Landmark Predictions with Applications to Metaverse

Abstract: This research aims to make metaverse characters more realistic by adding lip animations learnt from videos in the wild. To achieve this, our approach is to extend Tacotron 2 text-to-speech synthesizer to generate lip movements together with mel spectrogram in one pass. The encoder and gate layer weights are pre-trained on LJ Speech 1.1 data set while the decoder is retrained on 93 clips of TED talk videos extracted from LRS 3 data set. Our novel decoder predicts displacement in 20 lip landmark positions across time, using labels automatically extracted by OpenFace 2.0 landmark predictor. Training converged in 7 hours using less than 5 minutes of video. We conducted ablation study for Pre/Post-Net and pre-trained encoder weights to demonstrate the effectiveness of transfer learning between audio and visual speech data.