# GANimation: Anatomically-aware Facial Animation from a Single Image

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.09251 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09251/

## Key facts

- Cited by 161 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jul 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 161)

- [Multi-attentional Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02406/) (2021)
- [Motion Representations for Articulated Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11280/) (2021)
- [Thin-Plate Spline Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14367/) (2022)
- [Audio-Driven Emotional Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07452/) (2021)
- [ABAW: Valence-Arousal Estimation, Expression Recognition, Action Unit Detection & Multi-Task Learning Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10659/) (2022)
- [Diffused Heads: Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Talking-Face Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03396/) (2023)
- [Image-to-Image Translation: Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08629/) (2021)
- [DCFace: Synthetic Face Generation with Dual Condition Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07060/) (2023)
- [M2TR: Multi-modal Multi-scale Transformers for Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09770/) (2021)
- [VideoReTalking: Audio-based Lip Synchronization for Talking Head Video Editing In the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14758/) (2022)
- [Progressive Disentangled Representation Learning for Fine-Grained Controllable Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14506/) (2022)
- [FACIAL: Synthesizing Dynamic Talking Face with Implicit Attribute Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07938/) (2021)
- [Deepfakes Generation and Detection: State-of-the-art, open challenges, countermeasures, and way forward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00484/) (2021)
- [Efficient Emotional Adaptation for Audio-Driven Talking-Head Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04946/) (2023)
- [DFA-NeRF: Personalized Talking Head Generation via Disentangled Face Attributes Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00791/) (2022)
- [Defect-GAN: High-Fidelity Defect Synthesis for Automated Defect Inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15158/) (2021)
- [Image-to-image Translation via Hierarchical Style Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01456/) (2021)
- [Reverse Engineering of Generative Models: Inferring Model Hyperparameters from Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07873/) (2021)
- [Countering Malicious DeepFakes: Survey, Battleground, and Horizon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00218/) (2021)
- [SPACE: Speech-driven Portrait Animation with Controllable Expression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09809/) (2022)
- [AniFaceGAN: Animatable 3D-Aware Face Image Generation for Video Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06465/) (2022)
- [DPE: Disentanglement of Pose and Expression for General Video Portrait Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06281/) (2023)
- [Implicit Warping for Animation with Image Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01794/) (2022)
- [SepMark: Deep Separable Watermarking for Unified Source Tracing and Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06321/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity and Freely Controllable Talking Head Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10168/) (2023)
- [QS-Attn: Query-Selected Attention for Contrastive Learning in I2I Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08483/) (2022)
- [High-fidelity Generalized Emotional Talking Face Generation with Multi-modal Emotion Space Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02572/) (2023)
- [High-Fidelity and Arbitrary Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15814/) (2021)
- [Structure-Aware Motion Transfer with Deformable Anchor Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05018/) (2022)
- [FSGANv2: Improved Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12972/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown impressive results for task of facial expression synthesis. The most successful architecture is StarGAN, that conditions GANs generation process with images of a specific domain, namely a set of images of persons sharing the same expression. While effective, this approach can only generate a discrete number of expressions, determined by the content of the dataset. To address this limitation, in this paper, we introduce a novel GAN conditioning scheme based on Action Units (AU) annotations, which describes in a continuous manifold the anatomical facial movements defining a human expression. Our approach allows controlling the magnitude of activation of each AU and combine several of them. Additionally, we propose a fully unsupervised strategy to train the model, that only requires images annotated with their activated AUs, and exploit attention mechanisms that make our network robust to changing backgrounds and lighting conditions. Extensive evaluation show that our approach goes beyond competing conditional generators both in the capability to synthesize a much wider range of expressions ruled by anatomically feasible muscle movements, as in the capacity of dealing with images in the wild.