Although significant progress has been made in the field of speech-driven 3D facial animation recently, the speech-driven animation of an indispensable facial component, eye gaze, has been overlooked by recent research. This is primarily due to the weak correlation between speech and eye gaze, as well as the scarcity of audio-gaze data, making it very challenging to generate 3D eye gaze motion from speech alone. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven method which can generate diverse 3D eye gaze motions in harmony with the speech. To achieve this, we firstly construct an audio-gaze dataset that contains about 14 hours of audio-mesh sequences featuring high-quality eye gaze motion, head motion and facial motion simultaneously. The motion data is acquired by performing lightweight eye gaze fitting and face reconstruction on videos from existing audio-visual datasets. We then tailor a novel speech-to-motion translation framework in which the head motions and eye gaze motions are jointly generated from speech but are modeled in two separate latent spaces. This design stems from the physiological knowledge that the rotation range of eyeballs is less than that of head. Through mapping the speech embedding into the two latent spaces, the difficulty in modeling the weak correlation between speech and non-verbal motion is thus attenuated. Finally, our TalkingEyes, integrated with a speech-driven 3D facial motion generator, can synthesize eye gaze motion, eye blinks, head motion and facial motion collectively from speech. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations, along with a perceptual user study, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in generating diverse and natural 3D eye gaze motions from speech.

The speech-driven facial animation technology is generally categorized into two main types: 3D and 2D talking face. Both of these have garnered considerable research attention in recent years. However, to our knowledge, the research into 3D talking face has not progressed as deeply as that of 2D talking face, particularly in terms of lip-sync and perceptual mouth movements. The lip-sync necessitates an impeccable synchronization between mouth motion and speech audio. The speech perception derived from the perceptual mouth movements should resemble that of the driving audio. To mind the gap between the two sub-fields, we propose Learn2Talk, a learning framework that enhances 3D talking face network by integrating two key insights from the field of 2D talking face. First, drawing inspiration from the audio-video sync network, we develop a 3D sync-lip expert model for the pursuit of lip-sync between audio and 3D facial motions. Second, we utilize a teacher model, carefully chosen from among 2D talking face methods, to guide the training of the audio-to-3D motions regression network, thereby increasing the accuracy of 3D vertex movements. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods in terms of lip-sync, vertex accuracy and perceptual movements. Finally, we showcase two applications of our framework: audio-visual speech recognition and speech-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting-based avatar animation.

Parametric 3D models have enabled a wide variety of computer vision and graphics tasks, such as modeling human faces, bodies and hands. In 3D face modeling, 3DMM is the most widely used parametric model, but can’t generate fine geometric details solely from identity and expression inputs. To tackle this limitation, we propose a neural parametric model named DNPM for the facial geometric details, which utilizes deep neural network to extract latent codes from facial displacement maps encoding details and wrinkles. Built upon DNPM, a novel 3DMM named Detailed3DMM is proposed, which augments traditional 3DMMs by including the synthesis of facial details only from the identity and expression inputs. Moreover, we show that DNPM and Detailed3DMM can facilitate two downstream applications: speech-driven detailed 3D facial animation and 3D face reconstruction from a degraded image. Extensive experiments have shown the usefulness of DNPM and Detailed3DMM, and the progressiveness of two proposed applications.