I-Brow: Hierarchical and Multimodal Transformer Model for Eyebrows Animation Synthesis.

The human face is a key channel of communication in human-human interaction. When communicating, humans spontaneously and continuously display various facial gestures, which convey a large panel of information to the interlocutors. Likewise, appropriate and coherent co-speech facial gestures are essential to render human-like and smooth interactions with social agents. We propose “I-Brow”, a model that produces expressive and natural upper facial gestures based on two modalities: text semantics and speech prosody. Our deep learning model is based on Transformers and convolutions. It has a hierarchical two-level encoding property: its input features are encoded, at both word and utterance levels, where an utterance corresponds to an Inter-Pausal Unit (IPU). We conduct subjective and objective evaluations to validate our approach.