From Pixels to Portraits: A Comprehensive Survey of Talking Head Generation Techniques and Applications

Understand

Talking head generation has progressed rapidly from landmark- and GAN-based facial animation to diffusion models, neural rendering, 3D-aware avatars, and foundation-model-assisted systems.

• This progress has enabled increasingly realistic audio-, image-, and video-driven talking heads, but it has also made the field difficult to navigate because methods differ substantially in their inputs, assumptions, controllability, temporal stability, computational cost, and risks of misuse.
• This survey provides a critical review of talking head generation techniques, organizing the literature into four broad families: image-driven, audio-driven, video-driven, and 3D/neural-rendering-based approaches.
• For each family, we discuss the underlying technical ideas, representative methods, strengths, limitations, datasets, and evaluation practices.