Skip to main content

Style-controllable speech-driven gesture synthesis using normalising flows

Time: Tue 2020-05-05 15.15

Location: Zoom URL

Participating: Simon Alexanderson

Export to calendar

Automatic synthesis of realistic gestures promises to transform the
fields of animation, avatars and communicative agents. In off-line
applications, novel tools can alter the role of an animator to that of a
director, who provides only high-level input for the desired animation;
a learned network then translates these instructions into an appropriate
sequence of body poses. In interactive scenarios, systems for generating
natural animations on the fly are key to achieving believable and
relatable characters. In this paper we address some of the core issues
towards these ends. By adapting a deep learning-based motion synthesis
method called MoGlow, we propose a new generative model for generating
state-of-the-art realistic speech-driven gesticulation. Owing to the
probabilistic nature of the approach, our model can produce a battery of
different, yet plausible, gestures given the same input speech signal.
Just like humans, this gives a rich natural variation of motion. We
additionally demonstrate the ability to exert directorial control over
the output style, such as gesture level, speed, symmetry and spacial
extent. Such control can be leveraged to convey a desired character
personality or mood. We achieve all this without any manual annotation
of the data. User studies evaluating upper-body gesticulation confirm
that the generated motions are natural and well match the input speech.
Our method scores above all prior systems and baselines on these
measures, and comes close to the ratings of the original recorded
motions. We furthermore find that we can accurately control
gesticulation styles without unnecessarily compromising perceived
naturalness. Finally, we also demonstrate an application of the same
method to full-body gesticulation, including the synthesis of stepping
motion and stance.

Link: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/61291821429?pwd=OVF1MDZ4TTd1QVIrTWJqK3E1OFBDQT09