VPT: Video portraits transformer for realistic talking face generation.

Talking face generation is a promising approach within various domains, such as digital assistants, video editing, and virtual video conferences. Previous works with audio-driven talking faces focused primarily on the synchronization between audio and video. However, existing methods still have certain limitations in synthesizing photo-realistic video with high identity preservation, audiovisual synchronization, and facial details like blink movements. To solve these problems, a novel talking face generation framework, termed video portraits transformer (VPT) with controllable blink movements is proposed and applied. It separates the process of video generation into two stages, i.e., audio-to-landmark and landmark-to-face stages. In the audio-to-landmark stage, the transformer encoder serves as the generator used for predicting whole facial landmarks from given audio and continuous eye aspect ratio (EAR). During the landmark-to-face stage, the video-to-video (vid-to-vid) network is employed to transfer landmarks into realistic talking face videos. Moreover, to imitate real blink movements during inference, a transformer-based spontaneous blink generation module is devised to generate the EAR sequence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the VPT method can produce photo-realistic videos of talking faces with natural blink movements, and the spontaneous blink generation module can generate blink movements close to the real blink duration distribution and frequency.