mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Animating Arbitrary Objects via Deep Motion Transfer

arXiv 1812.08861 ↗First posted 20 Dec 2018cs.GR cs.CV cs.LGcited by 208

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Cited by 29 in Diffusion models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces a novel deep learning framework for image animation. Given an input image with a target object and a driving video sequence depicting a moving object, our framework generates a video in which the target object is animated according to the driving sequence. This is achieved through a deep architecture that decouples appearance and motion information. Our framework consists of three main modules: (i) a Keypoint Detector unsupervisely trained to extract object keypoints, (ii) a Dense Motion prediction network for generating dense heatmaps from sparse keypoints, in order to better encode motion information and (iii) a Motion Transfer Network, which uses the motion heatmaps and appearance information extracted from the input image to synthesize the output frames. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on several benchmark datasets, spanning a wide variety of object appearances, and show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art image animation and video generation methods. Our source code is publicly available.

Key facts. Cited by 208 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2018.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 51; 2022: 44; 2023: 39; 2024: 39; 2025: 26; 2026: 9.

208 papers.

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  1. 2023Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animationcited by 688
  2. 2023DynamiCrafter: Animating Open-domain Images with Video Diffusion Priorscited by 471
  3. 2023Learning Interactive Real-World Simulatorscited by 458
  4. 2023MagicAnimate: Temporally Consistent Human Image Animation using Diffusion Modelcited by 330
  5. 2021Motion Representations for Articulated Animationcited by 255
  6. 2022Thin-Plate Spline Motion Model for Image Animationcited by 210
  7. 2021PIRenderer: Controllable Portrait Image Generation via Semantic Neural Renderingcited by 203
  8. 2021Improving Sign Language Translation with Monolingual Data by Sign Back-Translationcited by 179
  9. 2022Depth-Aware Generative Adversarial Network for Talking Head Video Generationcited by 178
  10. 2022StyleHEAT: One-Shot High-Resolution Editable Talking Face Generation via Pre-trained StyleGANcited by 169
  11. 2023DreamPose: Fashion Image-to-Video Synthesis via Stable Diffusioncited by 167
  12. 2022EAMM: One-Shot Emotional Talking Face via Audio-Based Emotion-Aware Motion Modelcited by 151
38 more
  1. 2021Audio2Head: Audio-driven One-shot Talking-head Generation with Natural Head Motioncited by 149
  2. 2023DisCo: Disentangled Control for Realistic Human Dance Generationcited by 142
  3. 2022MegaPortraits: One-shot Megapixel Neural Head Avatarscited by 131
  4. 2023Space-Time Diffusion Features for Zero-Shot Text-Driven Motion Transfercited by 124
  5. 2023Motion-Conditioned Diffusion Model for Controllable Video Synthesiscited by 99
  6. 2023Generative Image Dynamicscited by 94
  7. 2024X-Portrait: Expressive Portrait Animation with Hierarchical Motion Attentioncited by 91
  8. 2022MetaPortrait: Identity-Preserving Talking Head Generation with Fast Personalized Adaptationcited by 69
  9. 2023Human-Art: A Versatile Human-Centric Dataset Bridging Natural and Artificial Scenescited by 68
  10. 2023One-Shot High-Fidelity Talking-Head Synthesis with Deformable Neural Radiance Fieldcited by 68
  11. 2022Synthetic Data -- what, why and how?cited by 67
  12. 2024Face Adapter for Pre-Trained Diffusion Models with Fine-Grained ID and Attribute Controlcited by 67
  13. 2021Playable Video Generationcited by 64
  14. 2024HumanVid: Demystifying Training Data for Camera-controllable Human Image Animationcited by 64
  15. 2025Animate Anyone 2: High-Fidelity Character Image Animation with Environment Affordancecited by 61
  16. 2021Neural Re-Rendering of Humans from a Single Imagecited by 59
  17. 2024Magic-Me: Identity-Specific Video Customized Diffusioncited by 59
  18. 2022AvatarCLIP: Zero-Shot Text-Driven Generation and Animation of 3D Avatarscited by 55
  19. 2022Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Video Generationcited by 55
  20. 2023NOFA: NeRF-based One-shot Facial Avatar Reconstructioncited by 53
  21. 2021Stochastic Image-to-Video Synthesis using cINNscited by 49
  22. 2023Face Animation with an Attribute-Guided Diffusion Modelcited by 48
  23. 2022Implicit Warping for Animation with Image Setscited by 45
  24. 2023Learning Personalized High Quality Volumetric Head Avatars from Monocular RGB Videoscited by 44
  25. 2023High-Fidelity and Freely Controllable Talking Head Video Generationcited by 42
  26. 2025HumanDiT: Pose-Guided Diffusion Transformer for Long-form Human Motion Video Generationcited by 39
  27. 2021Understanding Object Dynamics for Interactive Image-to-Video Synthesiscited by 38
  28. 2022Structure-Aware Motion Transfer with Deformable Anchor Modelcited by 34
  29. 2023VOODOO 3D: Volumetric Portrait Disentanglement for One-Shot 3D Head Reenactmentcited by 33
  30. 2021Unsupervised Learning of Visual 3D Keypoints for Controlcited by 30
  31. 2022Skeleton-free Pose Transfer for Stylized 3D Characterscited by 30
  32. 2024Motion Inversion for Video Customizationcited by 30
  33. 2022Playable Environments: Video Manipulation in Space and Timecited by 29
  34. 2025X-NeMo: Expressive Neural Motion Reenactment via Disentangled Latent Attentioncited by 28
  35. 2021Dynamic Neural Garmentscited by 27
  36. 2024VividPose: Advancing Stable Video Diffusion for Realistic Human Image Animationcited by 27
  37. 2021Sparse to Dense Motion Transfer for Face Image Animationcited by 25
  38. 2023Bidirectionally Deformable Motion Modulation For Video-based Human Pose Transfercited by 25

50 most cited of 208 All 208 (JSON)