CoP: Chain-of-Pose for Image Animation in Large Pose Changes

Image animation involves generating a video of a source image imitating the pose of a driving video. Despite recent advancements in the image animation task, most state-of-the-art methods remain vulnerable to large pose changes. In cases of large pose changes, existing methods struggle to model the complex nonlinear motion and yield distorted results, which greatly restricts their application in the real world. To tackle this problem, we present a novel approach called Chain-of-Pose (CoP) that decomposes large pose changes into a sequence of intermediate pose changes. This enables us to handle simplified pose changes and improves the accuracy of pose estimation. Furthermore, to better preserve the appearance of the source object, we introduce the Appearance Refinement Module (ARM) that effectively integrates the appearance texture feature of the source image with the structural pose feature from the pose chain. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on four diverse datasets, comprising talking faces, human bodies, and pixel animals. Notably, our approach significantly improves video quality in the case of large object pose changes. Our code is attached to the supplementary material.