Thefaceconveysablendofverbalandnonverbalinformation playing an important role in daily interaction. While speech articulation mostly affects the orofacial areas, emotional behaviors are externalized across the entire face. Considering the relation between verbal and non-verbal behaviors is important to create naturalistic facial movements for conversational agents (CAs). Furthermore, facial muscles connect areas across the face, creating principled relationships and dependencies between the movements that have to be taken into account. These relationships are ignored when facial movements across the face are sep- arately generated. This paper proposes to create speech-driven models that jointly capture the relationship not only between speech and facial movements, but also across facial movements. The input to the models are features extracted from speech that convey the verbal and emotional states of the speakers. We build our models with bidirectional long-short term memory (BLSTM) units which are shown to be very successful in modeling dependencies for sequential data. The objective and subjective evaluations of the results demonstrate the benefits of joint modeling of facial regions using this framework.
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Novel Realizations of Speech-driven Head Movements with Generative Adversarial Networks
Head movement is an integral part of face-to-face communications. It is important to investigate methodologies to generate naturalistic movements for conversational agents (CAs). The predominant method for head movement generation is using rules based on the meaning of the message. However, the variations of head movements by these methods are bounded by the predefined dictionary of gestures. Speech-driven methods offer an alternative approach, learning the relationship between speech and head movements from real recordings. However, previous studies do not generate novel realizations for a repeated speech signal. Conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) provides a framework to generate multiple realizations of head movements for each speech segment by sampling from a conditioned distribution. We build a conditional GAN with bidirectional long-short term memory (BLSTM), which is suitable for capturing the long-short term dependencies of time- continuous signals. This model learns the distribution of head movements conditioned on speech prosodic features. We compare this model with a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) and BLSTM models optimized to reduce mean squared error (MSE) or to increase concordance correlation. The objective evaluations and subjective evaluations of the results showed better performance for the condi- tional GAN model compared with these baseline systems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1718944
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10072819
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2018)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 6169-6173
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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