Audio-Driven Facial Landmark Generation in Violin Performance using 3DCNN Network with Self Attention Model

In a music scenario, both auditory and visual elements are essential to achieve an outstanding performance. Recent research has focused on the generation of body movements or fingering from audio in music performance. The audio-driven face generation technique in music performance is still deficient. In this paper, we compile a violin soundtrack and facial expression dataset (VSFE) for modeling facial expressions in violin performance. To our knowledge, this is the first dataset mapping the relationship between violin performance audio and musicians’ facial expressions. We then propose a 3DCNN network with self-attention and residual blocks for audio-driven facial expression generation. In the experiments, we compare our methods with three baselines on talking face generation. The codes and dataset are available on the Github (https://github.com/kevinlin91/icassp_music2face).