Emotional facial expression transfer from a single image via generative adversarial nets

Facial expression transfer from a single image is a challenging task and has drawn sustained attention in the fields of computer vision and computer graphics. Recently, generative adversarial nets (GANs) have provided a new approach to facial expression transfer from a single image toward target facial expressions. However, it is still difficult to obtain a sequence of smoothly changed facial expressions. We present a novel GAN‐based method for generating emotional facial expression animations given a single image and several facial landmarks for the in‐between stages. In particular, landmarks of other subjects are incorporated into a GAN model to control the generated facial expression from a latent space. With the trained model, high‐quality face images and a smoothly changed facial expression sequence can be effectively obtained, which are showed qualitatively and quantitatively in our experiments on the Multi‐PIE and CK+ data sets.