November 2022

Prof. C V Jawahar and his students presented a paper on Compressing Video Calls using Synthetic Talking Heads at the 33rd British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC-2022) at London from 21 –  24 November.  The authors of this paper are Madhav Agarwal, Anchit Gupta, Rudrabha Mukhopadhyay, Vinay P  Namboodiri, University of Bath and C V Jawahar.

Research work as explained by the authors:

We leverage the modern advancements in talking head generation to propose an end-to-end system for talking head video compression. Our algorithm transmits pivot frames intermittently while the rest of the talking head video is generated by animating them. We use a state-of-the-art face reenactment network to detect key points in the non-pivot frames and transmit them to the receiver. A dense flow is then calculated to warp a pivot frame to reconstruct the non-pivot ones. Transmitting key points instead of full frames leads to significant compression. We propose a novel algorithm to adaptively select the best-suited pivot frames at regular intervals to provide a smooth experience. We also propose a frame-interpolater at the receiver’s end to improve the compression levels further. Finally, a face enhancement network improves reconstruction quality, significantly improving several aspects like the sharpness of the generations. We evaluate our method both qualitatively and quantitatively on benchmark datasets and compare it with multiple compression techniques.

We release a demo video and additional information at https://cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/ cvit-projects/talking-video-compression.

The British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) is the British Machine Vision Association (BMVA) annual conference on machine vision, image processing, and pattern recognition. It is one of the major international conferences on computer vision and related areas held in the UK. With increasing popularity and quality, it has established itself as a prestigious event on the vision calendar.

Conference page: https://bmvc2022.org/