The ability of Generative Adversarial Networks to encode rich semantics within their latent space has been widely adopted for facial image editing. However, replicating their success with videos has proven challenging. Applying StyleGAN editing to real videos introduces two main challenges: (i) StyleGAN operates over aligned crops. When editing videos, these crops need to be pasted back into the frame, resulting in a spatial inconsistency. (ii) Videos introduce a fundamental barrier to overcome — temporal coherency. To address the first challenge, we propose a novel stitching-tuning procedure. The generator is carefully tuned to overcome the spatial artifacts at crop borders, resulting in smooth transitions even when difficult backgrounds are involved. Turning to temporal coherence, we propose that this challenge is largely artificial. The source video is already temporally coherent, and deviations arise in part due to careless treatment of individual components in the editing pipeline. We leverage the natural alignment of StyleGAN and the tendency of neural networks to learn low-frequency functions, and demonstrate that they provide a strongly consistent prior. These components are combined in an end-to-end framework for semantic editing of facial videos. We compare our pipeline to the current state-of-the-art and demonstrate significant improvements. Our method produces meaningful manipulations and maintains greater spatial and temporal consistency, even on challenging talking head videos which current methods struggle with. Our code and videos are available at https://stitch-time.github.io/.

Abstract In unsupervised video retargeting, content is transferred from one video to another while preserving the original appearance and style, without any additional annotations. While this challenge has seen substantial advancements through the use of deep neural networks, current methods struggle when the source and target videos are of shapes that are different in limb lengths or other body proportions. In this work, we consider this task for the case of objects of different shapes and appearances, that consist of similar skeleton connectivity and depict similar motion. We introduce JOKR—a JOint Keypoint Representation that captures the geometry common to both videos, while being disentangled from their unique styles. Our model first extracts unsupervised keypoints from the given videos. From this representation, two decoders reconstruct geometry and appearance, one for each of the input sequences. By employing an affine‐invariant domain confusion term over the keypoints bottleneck, we enforce the unsupervised keypoint representations of both videos to be indistinguishable. This encourages the aforementioned disentanglement between motion and appearance, mapping similar poses from both domains to the same representation. This allows yielding a sequence with the appearance and style of one video, but the content of the other. Our applicability is demonstrated through challenging video pairs compared to state‐of‐the‐art methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this geometry‐driven representation enables intuitive control, such as temporal coherence and manual pose editing. Videos can be viewed in the supplement HTML.