![[2602.07506] VividFace: Real-Time and Realistic Facial Expression Shadowing for Humanoid Robots](https://arxiv.org/static/browse/0.3.4/images/arxiv-logo-fb.png){kind=logo}
[2602.07506] VividFace: Real-Time and Realistic Facial Expression Shadowing for Humanoid Robots
Summary
VividFace presents a real-time system for humanoid robots to mimic human facial expressions, enhancing emotional interaction through advanced motion transfer techniques.
Why It Matters
This research addresses significant limitations in humanoid robotics, particularly in achieving realistic and timely facial expression imitation. By improving human-robot interaction, VividFace has implications for social robotics, entertainment, and therapy, where emotional expressiveness is crucial.
Key Takeaways
- VividFace enables real-time facial expression shadowing in humanoid robots.
- The system uses an optimized imitation framework for better expressiveness.
- Real-time performance is achieved with a video-stream-compatible inference pipeline.
- The technology allows for generalization across diverse facial configurations.
- Extensive demonstrations validate the practical utility of VividFace.
Computer Science > Robotics arXiv:2602.07506 (cs) [Submitted on 7 Feb 2026 (v1), last revised 14 Feb 2026 (this version, v2)] Title:VividFace: Real-Time and Realistic Facial Expression Shadowing for Humanoid Robots Authors:Peizhen Li, Longbing Cao, Xiao-Ming Wu, Yang Zhang View a PDF of the paper titled VividFace: Real-Time and Realistic Facial Expression Shadowing for Humanoid Robots, by Peizhen Li and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Humanoid facial expression shadowing enables robots to realistically imitate human facial expressions in real time, which is critical for lifelike, facially expressive humanoid robots and affective human-robot interaction. Existing progress in humanoid facial expression imitation remains limited, often failing to achieve either real-time performance or realistic expressiveness due to offline video-based inference designs and insufficient ability to capture and transfer subtle expression details. To address these limitations, we present VividFace, a real-time and realistic facial expression shadowing system for humanoid robots. An optimized imitation framework X2CNet++ enhances expressiveness by fine-tuning the human-to-humanoid facial motion transfer module and introducing a feature-adaptation training strategy for better alignment across different image sources. Real-time shadowing is further enabled by a video-stream-compatible inference pipeline and a streamlined workflow based on asynchronous I/O for efficient commun...
