FaceXHuBERT: Text-less Speech-driven E(X)pressive 3D Facial Animation Synthesis Using Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning

This paper presents FaceXHuBERT, a text-less speech-driven 3D facial animation generation method that generates facial cues driven by an emotional expressiveness condition. In addition, it can handle audio recorded in a variety of situations (e.g. background noise, multiple people speaking). Recent approaches employ end-to-end deep learning taking into account both audio and text as input to generate 3D facial animation. However, scarcity of publicly available expressive audio-3D facial animation datasets poses a major bottleneck. The resulting animations still have issues regarding accurate lip-syncing, emotional expressivity, person-specific facial cues and generalizability. In this work, we first achieve better results than state-of-the-art on the speech-driven 3D facial animation generation task by effectively employing the self-supervised pretrained HuBERT speech model that allows to incorporate both lexical and non-lexical information in the audio without using a large lexicon. Second, we incorporate emotional expressiveness modality by guiding the network with a binary emotion condition. We carried out extensive objective and subjective evaluations in comparison to ground-truth and state-of-the-art. A perceptual user study demonstrates that expressively generated facial animations using our approach are indeed perceived more realistic and are preferred over the non-expressive ones. In addition, we show that having a strong audio encoder alone eliminates the need of a complex decoder for the network architecture, reducing the network complexity and training time significantly. We provide the code1 publicly and recommend watching the video.