Skip to content

← ArchivePaper2022

ZeroEGGS: Zero-Shot Example-Based Gesture Generation from Speech

Saeed Ghorbani, Ylva Ferstl, Daniel Holden, Nikolaus F. Troje, Marc-Andre Carbonneau

EurographicsUbisoft138 citesMotion SynthesisFacial

Zero-shot speech-driven full-body gesture generation using example style references, trained on a diverse high-quality motion dataset.

Abstract

We present ZeroEGGS, a neural network framework for speech‐driven gesture generation with zero‐shot style control by example. This means style can be controlled via only a short example motion clip, even for motion styles unseen during training. Our model uses a Variational framework to learn a style embedding, making it easy to modify style through latent space manipulation or blending and scaling of style embeddings. The probabilistic nature of our framework further enables the generation of a variety of outputs given the input, addressing the stochastic nature of gesture motion. In a series of experiments, we first demonstrate the flexibility and generalizability of our model to new speakers and styles. In a user study, we then show that our model outperforms previous state‐of‐the‐art techniques in naturalness of motion, appropriateness for speech, and style portrayal. Finally, we release a high‐quality dataset of full‐body gesture motion including fingers, with speech, spanning across 19 different styles. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/ubisoft/ubisoft‐laforge‐ZeroEGGS.

How to read this

Category
Method: a speech-driven gesture generation model
Contributions
  • Zero-shot style control of full-body gesture via a single short example motion clip, including styles unseen in training
  • A variational style embedding allowing latent manipulation, blending, and scaling, with probabilistic sampling for varied outputs
  • Release of a high-quality full-body (with fingers) gesture-plus-speech dataset spanning 19 styles
Context
Builds on prior speech-to-gesture synthesis such as Ferstl's Multi-Objective Adversarial Gesture Generation, replacing adversarial training with a variational example-based style framework.Builds on: Multi-Objective Adversarial Gesture Generation
Correctness
Naturalness, appropriateness for speech, and style portrayal are assessed via a user study claiming to outperform prior state of the art, so claims rest on perceptual ratings; readers should remember user-study results are subjective and tied to this dataset.
Clarity
Accessible; a first pass conveys the example-based style idea, do a second pass for the variational formulation and latent operations.
How to read it
Focus first on how the style example is encoded into the latent embedding and mixed with speech; do a second pass on the variational loss if you intend to reproduce or extend the style control.

Builds on

Built upon by

Nothing yet.

Related work

Keywords

This page summarises the entry and links to its original source. The archive never hosts or redistributes the publication itself.Show it in the full archive list →