We devise a cascade GAN approach to generate talking face video, which is robust to different face shapes, view angles, facial characteristics, and noisy audio conditions. Instead of learning a direct mapping from audio to video frames, we propose first to transfer audio to high-level structure, i.e., the facial landmarks, and then to generate video frames conditioned on the landmarks. Compared to a direct audio-to-image approach, our cascade approach avoids fitting spurious correlations between audiovisual signals that are irrelevant to the speech content. We, humans, are sensitive to temporal discontinuities and subtle artifacts in video. To avoid those pixel jittering problems and to enforce the network to focus on audiovisual-correlated regions, we propose a novel dynamically adjustable pixel-wise loss with an attention mechanism. Furthermore, to generate a sharper image with well-synchronized facial movements, we propose a novel regression-based discriminator structure, which considers sequence-level information along with frame-level information. Thoughtful experiments on several datasets and real-world samples demonstrate significantly better results obtained by our method than the state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative comparisons.
Attention mechanism is an emerging topic in natural language tasks @cite_15 and image video generation task @cite_7 @cite_17 @cite_16 @cite_30 . @cite_7 generated facial expression conditioned on action units annotations. Instead of using a basic GAN structure, they exploited a generator that regresses an attention mask and a RGB color transformation over the entire image. The attention mask defines a per-pixel intensity specifying to what extend each pixel of the original image will contribute to the final rendered image. We adopt this attention mechanism to make our network robust to visual variations and noisy audio conditions. @cite_3 observed that integrating a weighted mask into the loss function during training can improve the performance of the reconstruction network. Based on this observation, rather than using a fixed loss weights, we propose a dynamically adjustable loss by leveraging the attention mechanism to emphasize the audiovisual regions.
@cite_30 @cite_7 @cite_3 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_17
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We propose a weakly-supervised approach that takes image-sentence pairs as input and learns to visually ground (i.e., localize) arbitrary linguistic phrases, in the form of spatial attention masks. Specifically, the model is trained with images and their associated image-level captions, without any explicit region-to-phrase correspondence annotations. To this end, we introduce an end-to-end model which learns visual groundings of phrases with two types of carefully designed loss functions. In addition to the standard discriminative loss, which enforces that attended image regions and phrases are consistently encoded, we propose a novel structural loss which makes use of the parse tree structures induced by the sentences. In particular, we ensure complementarity among the attention masks that correspond to sibling noun phrases, and compositionality of attention masks among the children and parent phrases, as defined by the sentence parse tree. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on the Microsoft COCO and Visual Genome datasets. We propose a weakly-supervised approach that takes image-sentence pairs as input and learns to visually ground (i.e., localize) arbitrary linguistic phrases, in the form of spatial attention masks. Specifically, the model is trained with images and their associated image-level captions, without any explicit region-to-phrase correspondence annotations. To this end, we introduce an end-to-end model which learns visual groundings of phrases with two types of carefully designed loss functions. In addition to the standard discriminative loss, which enforces that attended image regions and phrases are consistently encoded, we propose a novel structural loss which makes use of the parse tree structures induced by the sentences. In particular, we ensure complementarity among the attention masks that correspond to sibling noun phrases, and compositionality of attention masks among the children and parent phrases, as defined by the sentence parse tree. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on the Microsoft COCO and Visual Genome datasets. Recurrent sequence generators conditioned on input data through an attention mechanism have recently shown very good performance on a range of tasks including machine translation, handwriting synthesis [1,2] and image caption generation [3]. We extend the attention-mechanism with features needed for speech recognition. We show that while an adaptation of the model used for machine translation in [2] reaches a competitive 18.7 phoneme error rate (PER) on the TIMET phoneme recognition task, it can only be applied to utterances which are roughly as long as the ones it was trained on. We offer a qualitative explanation of this failure and propose a novel and generic method of adding location-awareness to the attention mechanism to alleviate this issue. The new method yields a model that is robust to long inputs and achieves 18 PER in single utterances and 20 in 10-times longer (repeated) utterances. Finally, we propose a change to the attention mechanism that prevents it from concentrating too much on single frames, which further reduces PER to 17.6 level. Attention mechanisms have attracted considerable interest in image captioning because of its powerful performance. Existing attention-based models use feedback information from the caption generator as guidance to determine which of the image features should be attended to. A common defect of these attention generation methods is that they lack a higher-level guiding information from the image itself, which sets a limit on selecting the most informative image features. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism, called topic-guided attention, which integrates image topics in the attention model as a guiding information to help select the most important image features. Moreover, we extract image features and image topics with separate networks, which can be fine-tuned jointly in an end-to-end manner during training. The experimental results on the benchmark Microsoft COCO dataset show that our method yields state-of-art performance on various quantitative metrics.