Generating emotional talking faces from a single portrait image remains a significant challenge. The simultaneous achievement of expressive emotional talking and accurate lip-sync is particularly difficult, as expressiveness is often compromised for lip-sync accuracy. Prevailing generative works usually struggle to juggle to generate subtle variations of emotional expression and lip-synchronized talking. To address these challenges, we suggest modeling the implicit and explicit correlations between audio and emotional talking faces with a unified framework. As human emotional expressions usually present subtle and implicit relations with speech audio, we propose incorporating audio and emotional style embeddings into the diffusion-based generation process, for realistic generation while concentrating on emotional expressions. We then propose lip-based explicit correlation learning to construct a strong mapping of audio to lip motions, assuring lip-audio synchronization. Furthermore, we deploy a video-to-video rendering module to transfer expressions and lip motions from a proxy 3D avatar to an arbitrary portrait. Both quantitatively and qualitatively, MagicTalk outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of expressiveness, lip-sync, and perceptual quality.

It remains an interesting and challenging problem to synthesize a vivid and realistic singing face driven by music. In this paper, we present a method for this task with natural motions for the lips, facial expression, head pose, and eyes. Due to the coupling of mixed information for the human voice and backing music in common music audio signals, we design a decouple-and-fuse strategy to tackle the challenge. We first decompose the input music audio into a human voice stream and a backing music stream. Due to the implicit and complicated correlation between the two-stream input signals and the dynamics of the facial expressions, head motions, and eye states, we model their relationship with an attention scheme, where the effects of the two streams are fused seamlessly. Furthermore, to improve the expressivenes of the generated results, we decompose head movement generation in terms of speed and direction, and decompose eye state generation into short-term blinking and long-term eye closing, modeling them separately. We have also built a novel dataset, SingingFace, to support training and evaluation of models for this task, including future work on this topic. Extensive experiments and a user study show that our proposed method is capable of synthesizing vivid singing faces, qualitatively and quantitatively better than the prior state-of-the-art.

In this paper we present a novel feature-based RGB-D camera pose optimization algorithm for real-time 3D reconstruction systems. During camera pose estimation, current methods in online systems suffer from fast-scanned RGB-D data, or generate inaccurate relative transformations between consecutive frames. Our approach improves current methods by utilizing matched features across all frames and is robust for RGB-D data with large shifts in consecutive frames. We directly estimate camera pose for each frame by efficiently solving a quadratic minimization problem to maximize the consistency of 3D points in global space across frames corresponding to matched feature points. We have implemented our method within two state-of-the-art online 3D reconstruction platforms. Experimental results testify that our method is efficient and reliable in estimating camera poses for RGB-D data with large shifts.

In this paper, we present a framework allowing users to interact with geometrically complex 3D deformable objects using (multiple) haptic devices based on an extended shape matching approach. There are two major challenges for haptic-enabled interaction using the shape matching method. The first is how to obtain a rapid deformation propagation when a large number of shape matching clusters exist. The second is how to robustly handle the collision response when the haptic interaction point hits the particle-sampled deformable volume. Our framework extends existing multi-resolution shape matching methods, providing an improved energy convergence rate. This is achieved by using adaptive integration strategies to avoid insignificant shape matching iterations during the simulation. Furthermore, we present a new mechanism called stable constraint particle coupling which ensures consistent deformable behavior during haptic interaction. As demonstrated in our experimental results, the proposed method provides natural and smooth haptic rendering as well as efficient yet stable deformable simulation of complex models in real time.