Talking Head Synthesis with Facial Landmark Guidance via 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract:Audio-driven digital human generation plays an important role in virtual communication, immersive interaction, and media production. With the development of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), recent talking-head systems have obtained more faithful 3D facial geometry and appearance modeling. A remaining difficulty is that speech features mainly describe temporal acoustic patterns rather than explicit facial layouts. As a result, directly driving 3D facial deformation with audio may produce inaccurate mouth motion, weak expression details, and local artifacts. To address this issue, we propose a facial-keypoint-guided spatial enhancement module. The predicted landmarks provide structural cues for selecting and enriching spatial points around expression-sensitive facial regions. We further introduce a global landmark compensation mechanism, where the full set of keypoints is encoded into a conditioning vector to refine 3DGS attributes. This compensation supplies whole-face structural information to the underlying shape representation. Experiments under self-driven and cross-driven settings show that the proposed method improves visual quality, facial realism, and lip synchronization.

Main paper (6 pages). Accepted for publication by IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 2026 (IEEE SMC 2026)

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Signal Processing (eess.SP)

arXiv:2609.17422 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.17422v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.17422 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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