  This paper presents a novel approach for generating 3D talking heads from raw
audio inputs. Our method grounds on the idea that speech related movements can
be comprehensively and efficiently described by the motion of a few control
points located on the movable parts of the face, i.e., landmarks. The
underlying musculoskeletal structure then allows us to learn how their motion
influences the geometrical deformations of the whole face. The proposed method
employs two distinct models to this aim: the first one learns to generate the
motion of a sparse set of landmarks from the given audio. The second model
expands such landmarks motion to a dense motion field, which is utilized to
animate a given 3D mesh in neutral state. Additionally, we introduce a novel
loss function, named Cosine Loss, which minimizes the angle between the
generated motion vectors and the ground truth ones. Using landmarks in 3D
talking head generation offers various advantages such as consistency,
reliability, and obviating the need for manual-annotation. Our approach is
designed to be identity-agnostic, enabling high-quality facial animations for
any users without additional data or training.
