  Speech-driven 3D facial animation has improved a lot recently while most
related works only utilize acoustic modality and neglect the influence of
visual and textual cues, leading to unsatisfactory results in terms of
precision and coherence. We argue that visual and textual cues are not trivial
information. Therefore, we present a novel framework, namely PMMTalk, using
complementary Pseudo Multi-Modal features for improving the accuracy of facial
animation. The framework entails three modules: PMMTalk encoder, cross-modal
alignment module, and PMMTalk decoder. Specifically, the PMMTalk encoder
employs the off-the-shelf talking head generation architecture and speech
recognition technology to extract visual and textual information from speech,
respectively. Subsequently, the cross-modal alignment module aligns the
audio-image-text features at temporal and semantic levels. Then PMMTalk decoder
is employed to predict lip-syncing facial blendshape coefficients. Contrary to
prior methods, PMMTalk only requires an additional random reference face image
but yields more accurate results. Additionally, it is artist-friendly as it
seamlessly integrates into standard animation production workflows by
introducing facial blendshape coefficients. Finally, given the scarcity of 3D
talking face datasets, we introduce a large-scale 3D Chinese Audio-Visual
Facial Animation (3D-CAVFA) dataset. Extensive experiments and user studies
show that our approach outperforms the state of the art. We recommend watching
the supplementary video.
