KoUniTalk: A Lightweight Articulation-Centered Korean-English 3D Talking Face Benchmark

RESUMO

High-quality 3D talking face datasets remain largely English-centric, and Korean 3D facial motion data are difficult to combine with standard English benchmarks because of differences in mesh topology, spatial scale, coordinate system, and temporal sampling. We present KoUniTalk, a lightweight articulation-centered Korean-English 3D talking face benchmark that retargets VOCASET and the released Korean speech-based 3D talking face data to a shared mesh topology using deformation transfer. Rather than proposing a new deformation-transfer algorithm or a full-head identity-preserving avatar dataset, KoUniTalk provides an identity-neutral canonical output space for controlled speech-driven facial articulation training and evaluation across English and Korean. The unified template contains 1,176 vertices and focuses on the mouth and adjacent lower- and mid-face regions, reducing the output dimensionality from 15,069 and 72,147 dimensions to 3,528 dimensions, corresponding to 4.27-fold and 20.45-fold reductions compared with VOCASET/FLAME and the original Korean mesh, respectively. To examine whether retargeting preserves speech-relevant motion, we evaluate semantic mouth-landmark trajectories, including mouth opening, mouth width, aperture ratio, and mouth-opening dynamics. Since the official test set of the Korean dataset is not publicly released, we additionally define a subject-disjoint Korean benchmark split. The processed matched benchmark contains 22 speakers, 4,978 sequences, and 642,781 frames, enabling Korean-English cross-dataset evaluation of speech-driven 3D facial animation models in a single compact articulation-template space. Source-reported inventory counts are listed separately from these processed counts.