2.5D Visual Speech Synthesis Using Appearance Models

Two dimensional (2D) shape and appearance models are applied to the problem of creating a near-videorealistic talking head. A speech corpus of a talker uttering a set of phonetically balanced training sentences is analysed using a generative model of the human face. Segments of original parameter trajectories, corresponding to the synthesis unit (e.g.~triphone), are extracted from a codebook, then normalised, blended, concatenated and smoothed before being applied to the model to give natural, realistic animations of novel utterances. The system provides a 2D image sequence corresponding to the face of a talker. It is also used to animate the face of a 3D avatar by displacing the mesh according to movements of points in the shape model and dynamically texturing the face polygons using the appearance model.