RealTalk: Real-time and Realistic Audio-driven Face Generation with 3D
  Facial Prior-guided Identity Alignment Network
Authors: name: Xiaozhong Ji, name: Chuming Lin, name: Zhonggan Ding, name: Ying Tai, name: Jian Yang, name: Junwei Zhu, name: Xiaobin Hu, name: Jiangning Zhang, name: Donghao Luo, name: Chengjie Wang

Person-generic audio-driven face generation is a challenging task in computer
vision. Previous methods have achieved remarkable progress in audio-visual
synchronization, but there is still a significant gap between current results
and practical applications. The challenges are two-fold: 1) Preserving unique
individual traits for achieving high-precision lip synchronization. 2)
Generating high-quality facial renderings in real-time performance. In this
paper, we propose a novel generalized audio-driven framework RealTalk, which
consists of an audio-to-expression transformer and a high-fidelity
expression-to-face renderer. In the first component, we consider both identity
and intra-personal variation features related to speaking lip movements. By
incorporating cross-modal attention on the enriched facial priors, we can
effectively align lip movements with audio, thus attaining greater precision in
expression prediction. In the second component, we design a lightweight facial
identity alignment (FIA) module which includes a lip-shape control structure
and a face texture reference structure. This novel design allows us to generate
fine details in real-time, without depending on sophisticated and inefficient
feature alignment modules. Our experimental results, both quantitative and
qualitative, on public datasets demonstrate the clear advantages of our method
in terms of lip-speech synchronization and generation quality. Furthermore, our
method is efficient and requires fewer computational resources, making it
well-suited to meet the needs of practical applications.