Learning to Dub Movies via Hierarchical Prosody Models

Given a piece of text, a video clip and a reference audio, the movie dubbing (also known as visual voice clone, V2C) task aims to generate speeches that match the speaker's emotion presented in the video using the desired speaker voice as reference. V2C is more challenging than conventional text-to-speech tasks as it additionally requires the generated speech to exactly match the varying emotions and speaking speed presented in the video. Unlike previous works, we propose a novel movie dubbing architecture to tackle these problems via hierarchical prosody modeling, which bridges the visual information to corresponding speech prosody from three aspects: lip, face, and scene. Specifically, we align lip movement to the speech duration, and convey facial expression to speech energy and pitch via attention mechanism based on valence and arousal representations inspired by the psychology findings. Moreover, we design an emotion booster to capture the atmosphere from global video scenes. All these embeddings are used together to generate mel-spectrogram, which is then converted into speech waves by an existing vocoder. Extensive experimental results on the V2C and Chem benchmark datasets demonstrate the favourable performance of the proposed method.