# StableAnimator [CVPR2025]
StableAnimator: High-Quality Identity-Preserving Human Image Animation
*Shuyuan Tu1, Zhen Xing1, Xintong Han3, Zhi-Qi Cheng4, Qi Dai2, Chong Luo2, Zuxuan Wu1*
[1Fudan University; 2Microsoft Research Asia; 3Huya Inc; 4Carnegie Mellon University]
Pose-driven Human image animations generated by StableAnimator, showing its power to synthesize high-fidelity and ID-preserving videos. All animations are directly synthesized by StableAnimator without the use of any face-related post-processing tools, such as the face-swapping tool FaceFusion or face restoration models like GFP-GAN and CodeFormer.
Comparison results between StableAnimator and state-of-the-art (SOTA) human image animation models highlight the superior performance of StableAnimator in delivering high-fidelity, identity-preserving human image animation.
## Overview
The overview of the framework of StableAnimator.
Current diffusion models for human image animation struggle to ensure identity (ID) consistency. This paper presents StableAnimator,
the first end-to-end ID-preserving video diffusion framework, which synthesizes high-quality videos without any post-processing, conditioned on a reference image and a sequence of poses. Building upon a video diffusion model, StableAnimator contains carefully designed modules for both training and inference striving for identity consistency. In particular, StableAnimator begins by computing image and face embeddings with off-the-shelf extractors, respectively and face embeddings are further refined by interacting with image embeddings using a global content-aware Face Encoder. Then, StableAnimator introduces a novel distribution-aware ID Adapter that prevents interference caused by temporal layers while preserving ID via alignment. During inference, we propose a novel Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation-based optimization to further enhance the face quality. We demonstrate that solving the HJB equation can be integrated into the diffusion denoising process, and the resulting solution constrains the denoising path and thus benefits ID preservation. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show the effectiveness of StableAnimator both qualitatively and quantitatively.
## News
* `[2025-3-10]`:The codes of HJB-based face optimization are released!
* `[2025-2-27]`: StableAnimator is accepted by CVPR2025. The code of HJB-based face optimization will be released in March. Stay tuned!
* `[2024-12-13]`: The training code and training tutorial are released! You can train/finetune your own StableAnimator on your own collected datasets! Other codes will be released very soon. Stay tuned!
* `[2024-12-10]`: The gradio interface is released! Many thanks to [@gluttony-10](https://space.bilibili.com/893892) for his contribution! Other codes will be released very soon. Stay tuned!
* `[2024-12-6]`: All data preprocessing codes (human skeleton extraction and human face mask extraction) are released! The training code and detailed training tutorial will be released before 2024.12.13. Stay tuned!
* `[2024-12-4]`: We are thrilled to release an interesting dance demo (APT Dance)! The generated video can be seen on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNPoAsWr_sk) and [Bilibili](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1KczXYhER7).
* `[2024-11-28]`: The data pre-processing codes (human skeleton extraction) are available! Other codes will be released very soon. Stay tuned!
* `[2024-11-26]`: The project page, code, technical report and [a basic model checkpoint](https://huggingface.co/FrancisRing/StableAnimator/tree/main) are released. Further training codes, data pre-processing codes, the evaluation dataset and StableAnimator-pro will be released very soon. Stay tuned!
## To-Do List
- [x] StableAnimator-basic
- [x] Inference Code
- [x] Evaluation Samples
- [x] Data Pre-Processing Code (Skeleton Extraction)
- [x] Data Pre-Processing Code (Human Face Mask Extraction)
- [x] Training Code
- [x] Inference Code with HJB-based Face Optimization
- [ ] StableAnimator-pro
## Quickstart
For the basic version of the model checkpoint, it supports generating videos at a 576x1024 or 512x512 resolution. If you encounter insufficient memory issues, you can appropriately reduce the number of animated frames.
### Environment setup
```
pip install torch==2.5.1 torchvision==0.20.1 torchaudio==2.5.1 --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu124
pip install torch==2.5.1+cu124 xformers --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu124
pip install -r requirements.txt
```
### Download weights
If you encounter connection issues with Hugging Face, you can utilize the mirror endpoint by setting the environment variable: `export HF_ENDPOINT=https://hf-mirror.com`.
Please download weights manually as follows:
```
cd StableAnimator
git lfs install
git clone https://huggingface.co/FrancisRing/StableAnimator checkpoints
```
All the weights should be organized in models as follows
The overall file structure of this project should be organized as follows:
```
…
```
Notably, there is a bug in the automatic download process of Antelopev2, with the error details described as follows:
```
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/StableAnimator/inference_normal.py", line 243, in
face_model = FaceModel()
File "/home/StableAnimator/animation/modules/face_model.py", line 11, in __init__
self.app = FaceAnalysis(
File "/opt/conda/lib/python3.10/site-packages/insightface/app/face_analysis.py", line 43, in __init__
assert 'detection' in self.models
AssertionError
```
This issue is related to the incorrect path of Antelopev2, which is automatically downloaded into the `models/antelopev2/antelopev2` directory. The correct path of Antelopev2 should be `models/antelopev2`. You can run the following commands to tackle this issue:
```
cd StableAnimator
mv ./models/antelopev2/antelopev2 ./models/tmp
rm -rf ./models/antelopev2
mv ./models/tmp ./models/antelopev2
```
### Evaluation Samples
The evaluation samples presented in the paper can be downloaded from [OneDrive](https://1drv.ms/f/c/becb962aad1a1f95/EubdzCAI7BFLhJff2LrHkt8BC9mOiwJ5V67t-ypxRnCK4Q?e=ElEmcn) or `inference.zip` in checkpoints. Please download evaluation samples manually as follows:
```
cd StableAnimator
mkdir inference
```
All the evaluation samples should be organized as follows:
```
inference/
├── case-1
│ ├── poses
│ ├── faces
│ └── reference.png
├── case-2
│ ├── poses
│ ├── faces
│ └── reference.png
├── case-3
│ ├── poses
│ ├── faces
│ └── reference.png
```
### Human Skeleton Extraction
We leverage the pre-trained DWPose to extract the human skeletons. In the initialization of DWPose, the pretrained weights should be configured in `/DWPose/dwpose_utils/wholebody.py`:
```
onnx_det = 'path/checkpoints/DWPose/yolox_l.onnx'
onnx_pose = 'path/checkpoints/DWPose/dw-ll_ucoco_384.onnx'
```
Given the target image folder containing multiple .png files, you can use the following command to obtain the corresponding human skeleton images:
```
python DWPose/skeleton_extraction.py --target_image_folder_path="path/test/target_images" --ref_image_path="path/test/reference.png" --poses_folder_path="path/test/poses"
```
It is worth noting that the .png files in the target image folder are named in the format `frame_i.png`, such as `frame_0.png`, `frame_1.png`, and so on.
`--ref_image_path` refers to the path of the given reference image. The obtained human skeleton images are saved in `path/test/poses`. It is particularly significant that the target skeleton images should be aligned with the reference image regarding the body shape.
If you only have the target MP4 file (target.mp4), we recommend you to use `ffmpeg` to convert the MP4 file to multiple frames (.png files) without any quality loss.
```
ffmpeg -i target.mp4 -q:v 1 -start_number 0 path/test/target_images/frame_%d.png
```
The obtained frames are saved in `path/test/target_images`.
### Human Face Mask Extraction
Given the path to an image folder containing multiple RGB `.png` files, you can run the following command to extract the corresponding human face masks:
```
python face_mask_extraction.py --image_folder="path/StableAnimator/inference/your_case/target_images"
```
`path/StableAnimator/inference/your_case/target_images` contains multiple `.png` files. The obtained masks are saved in `path/StableAnimator/inference/your_case/faces`.
### Base Model inference
A sample configuration for testing is provided as `command_basic_infer.sh`. You can also easily modify the various configurations according to your needs.
```
bash command_basic_infer.sh
```
StableAnimator supports human image animation at two different resolution settings: 512x512 and 576x1024. You can modify "--width" and "--height" in `command_basic_infer.sh` to set the resolution of the animation. "--output_dir" in `command_basic_infer.sh` refers to the saved path of the generated animation. "--validation_control_folder" and "--validation_image" in `command_basic_infer.sh` refer to the paths of the given pose sequence and the reference image, respectively.
"--pretrained_model_name_or_path" in `command_basic_infer.sh` is the path of pretrained SVD. "posenet_model_name_or_path", "face_encoder_model_name_or_path", and "unet_model_name_or_path" in `command_basic_infer.sh` refer to paths of pretrained StableAnimator weights.
If you have enough GPU resources, you can increase the value (4=>8=>16) of "--decode_chunk_size" in `command_basic_infer.sh` to promote the temporal smoothness of the animation.
Tips: if your GPU memory is limited, you can reduce the number of animated frames. This command will generate two files:
animated_images and
animated_images.gif.
If you want to obtain the high quality MP4 file, we recommend you to leverage ffmpeg on the
animated_images as follows:
```
cd animated_images
ffmpeg -framerate 20 -i frame_%d.png -c:v libx264 -crf 10 -pix_fmt yuv420p /path/animation.mp4
```
"-framerate" refers to the fps setting. "-crf" indicates the quality of the generated MP4 file, with smaller values corresponding to higher quality.
Additionally, you can also run the following command to launch a Gradio interface:
```
python app.py
```
### Model inference with HJB-based Face Optimization
A sample configuration for testing is provided as `command_op_infer.sh`. You can also easily modify the various configurations according to your needs.
```
bash command_op_infer.sh
```
`--num_optimization_iter`, `--start_refine_step`, and `--end_refine_step` refer to the epoch number of HJB-based face optimization at each timestep, the start time of the optimization, and the end time of the optimization, respectively.
These three parameters need to be adaptively modified in certain situations based on the specific input videos and reference image.
`--face_embedding_extractor_weight_path` can be downloaded from [HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/FrancisRing/StableAnimator/tree/main/Animation).
Notably, you should extract the corresponding face masks before conducting our JHB-based optimization. For more details about human face extraction, please refer to the Human Face Mask Extraction Section in the README file.
### Model Training
It’s worth noting that if you’re looking to train a conditioned Stable Vi