Generating realistic talking faces is a complex and widely discussed task with numerous applications. In this paper, we present DiffTalker, a novel model designed to generate lifelike talking faces through audio and landmark co-driving. DiffTalker addresses the challenges associated with directly applying diffusion models to audio control, which are traditionally trained on text-image pairs. DiffTalker consists of two agent networks: a transformer-based landmarks completion network for geometric accuracy and a diffusion-based face generation network for texture details. Landmarks play a pivotal role in establishing a seamless connection between the audio and image domains, facilitating the incorporation of knowledge from pre-trained diffusion models. This innovative approach efficiently produces articulate-speaking faces. Experimental results showcase DiffTalker's superior performance in producing clear and geometrically accurate talking faces, all without the need for additional alignment between audio and image features.
@article{arxiv.2309.07509,
title = {DiffTalker: Co-driven audio-image diffusion for talking faces via intermediate landmarks},
author = {Zipeng Qi and Xulong Zhang and Ning Cheng and Jing Xiao and Jianzong Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.07509},
year = {2023}
}