LIA: Latent Image Animator

Previous animation techniques mainly focus on leveraging explicit structure representations (e.g., meshes or keypoints) for transferring motion from driving videos to source images. However, such methods are challenged with large appearance variations between source and driving data, as well as require complex additional modules to respectively model appearance and motion. Towards addressing these issues, we introduce the Latent Image Animator (LIA), streamlined to animate high-resolution images. LIA is designed as a simple autoencoder that does not rely on explicit representations. Motion transfer in the pixel space is modeled as linear navigation of motion codes in the latent space. Specifically such navigation is represented as an orthogonal motion dictionary learned in a self-supervised manner based on proposed Linear Motion Decomposition (LMD). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LIA outperforms state-of-the-art on VoxCeleb, TaichiHD, and TED-talk datasets with respect to video quality and spatio-temporal consistency. In addition LIA is well equipped for zero-shot high-resolution image animation. Code, models, and demo video are available at https://github.com/wyhsirius/LIA.