Jump Cut Smoothing for Talking Heads
Authors: name: Xiaojuan Wang, name: Taesung Park, name: Yang Zhou, name: Eli Shechtman, name: Richard Zhang

A jump cut offers an abrupt, sometimes unwanted change in the viewing
experience. We present a novel framework for smoothing these jump cuts, in the
context of talking head videos. We leverage the appearance of the subject from
the other source frames in the video, fusing it with a mid-level representation
driven by DensePose keypoints and face landmarks. To achieve motion, we
interpolate the keypoints and landmarks between the end frames around the cut.
We then use an image translation network from the keypoints and source frames,
to synthesize pixels. Because keypoints can contain errors, we propose a
cross-modal attention scheme to select and pick the most appropriate source
amongst multiple options for each key point. By leveraging this mid-level
representation, our method can achieve stronger results than a strong video
interpolation baseline. We demonstrate our method on various jump cuts in the
talking head videos, such as cutting filler words, pauses, and even random
cuts. Our experiments show that we can achieve seamless transitions, even in
the challenging cases where the talking head rotates or moves drastically in
the jump cut.