# Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.03079 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03079/

## Key facts

- Cited by 259 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 259)

- [TEMOS: Generating diverse human motions from textual descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14109/) (2022)
- [AD-NeRF: Audio Driven Neural Radiance Fields for Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11078/) (2021)
- [I M Avatar: Implicit Morphable Head Avatars from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07471/) (2021)
- [A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03890/) (2024)
- [FaceFormer: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05329/) (2021)
- [NeRSemble: Multi-view Radiance Field Reconstruction of Human Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03027/) (2023)
- [MeshTalk: 3D Face Animation from Speech using Cross-Modality Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08223/) (2021)
- [CodeTalker: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Discrete Motion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02379/) (2023)
- [Generating Holistic 3D Human Motion from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04420/) (2022)
- [BEAT: A Large-Scale Semantic and Emotional Multi-Modal Dataset for Conversational Gestures Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05297/) (2022)
- [StyleHEAT: One-Shot High-Resolution Editable Talking Face Generation via Pre-trained StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04036/) (2022)
- [EmoTalk: Speech-Driven Emotional Disentanglement for 3D Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11089/) (2023)
- [DiffTalk: Crafting Diffusion Models for Generalized Audio-Driven Portraits Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03786/) (2023)
- [GeneFace: Generalized and High-Fidelity Audio-Driven 3D Talking Face Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13430/) (2023)
- [Semantic-Aware Implicit Neural Audio-Driven Video Portrait Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07786/) (2022)
- [EMAGE: Towards Unified Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation via Expressive Masked Audio Gesture Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00374/) (2023)
- [Learning Speech-driven 3D Conversational Gestures from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06837/) (2021)
- [Emotional Speech-Driven Animation with Content-Emotion Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08990/) (2023)
- [Learning Dynamic Facial Radiance Fields for Few-Shot Talking Head Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11770/) (2022)
- [One-shot Talking Face Generation from Single-speaker Audio-Visual Correlation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02749/) (2021)
- [A Complete Survey on Generative AI (AIGC): Is ChatGPT from GPT-4 to GPT-5 All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11717/) (2023)
- [From Audio to Photoreal Embodiment: Synthesizing Humans in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01885/) (2024)
- [Real-time Neural Radiance Talking Portrait Synthesis via Audio-spatial Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12368/) (2022)
- [DiffPoseTalk: Speech-Driven Stylistic 3D Facial Animation and Head Pose Generation via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00434/) (2023)
- [DFA-NeRF: Personalized Talking Head Generation via Disentangled Face Attributes Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00791/) (2022)
- [FaceDiffuser: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation Synthesis Using Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11306/) (2023)
- [Imitator: Personalized Speech-driven 3D Facial Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00023/) (2022)
- [SelfTalk: A Self-Supervised Commutative Training Diagram to Comprehend 3D Talking Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10799/) (2023)
- [LipSync3D: Data-Efficient Learning of Personalized 3D Talking Faces from Video using Pose and Lighting Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04185/) (2021)
- [DiffSHEG: A Diffusion-Based Approach for Real-Time Speech-driven Holistic 3D Expression and Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04747/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Audio-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, but achieving realistic, human-like performance is still unsolved. This is due to the lack of available 3D datasets, models, and standard evaluation metrics. To address this, we introduce a unique 4D face dataset with about 29 minutes of 4D scans captured at 60 fps and synchronized audio from 12 speakers. We then train a neural network on our dataset that factors identity from facial motion. The learned model, VOCA (Voice Operated Character Animation) takes any speech signal as input - even speech in languages other than English - and realistically animates a wide range of adult faces. Conditioning on subject labels during training allows the model to learn a variety of realistic speaking styles. VOCA also provides animator controls to alter speaking style, identity-dependent facial shape, and pose (i.e. head, jaw, and eyeball rotations) during animation. To our knowledge, VOCA is the only realistic 3D facial animation model that is readily applicable to unseen subjects without retargeting. This makes VOCA suitable for tasks like in-game video, virtual reality avatars, or any scenario in which the speaker, speech, or language is not known in advance. We make the dataset and model available for research purposes at http://voca.is.tue.mpg.de.