  Generating talking face videos from audio attracts lots of research interest.
A few person-specific methods can generate vivid videos but require the target
speaker's videos for training or fine-tuning. Existing person-generic methods
have difficulty in generating realistic and lip-synced videos while preserving
identity information. To tackle this problem, we propose a two-stage framework
consisting of audio-to-landmark generation and landmark-to-video rendering
procedures. First, we devise a novel Transformer-based landmark generator to
infer lip and jaw landmarks from the audio. Prior landmark characteristics of
the speaker's face are employed to make the generated landmarks coincide with
the facial outline of the speaker. Then, a video rendering model is built to
translate the generated landmarks into face images. During this stage, prior
appearance information is extracted from the lower-half occluded target face
and static reference images, which helps generate realistic and
identity-preserving visual content. For effectively exploring the prior
information of static reference images, we align static reference images with
the target face's pose and expression based on motion fields. Moreover,
auditory features are reused to guarantee that the generated face images are
well synchronized with the audio. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our
method can produce more realistic, lip-synced, and identity-preserving videos
than existing person-generic talking face generation methods.
