Beat on Gaze: Learning Stylized Generation of Gaze and Head Dynamics

Abstract: Head and gaze dynamics are crucial in expressive 3D facial animation for conveying emotion and intention. However, existing methods frequently address facial components in isolation, overlooking the intricate coordination between gaze, head motion, and speech. The scarcity of high-quality gaze-annotated datasets hinders the development of data-driven models capable of capturing realistic, personalized gaze control. To address these challenges, we propose StyGazeTalk, an audio-driven method that generates synchronized gaze and head motion styles. We extract speaker-specific motion traits from gaze-head sequences with a multi-layer LSTM structure incorporating a style encoder, enabling the generation of diverse animation styles. We also introduce a high-precision multimodal dataset comprising eye-tracked gaze, audio, head pose, and 3D facial parameters, providing a valuable resource for training and evaluating head and gaze control models. Experimental results demonstrate that our method generates realistic, temporally coherent, and style-aware head-gaze motions, significantly advancing the state-of-the-art in audio-driven facial animation.