Coarticulation and speech synchronization in MPEG-4 based facial animation

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel coarticulation and speech synchronization framework compliant with MPEG-4 facial animation. The system we have developed uses MPEG-4 facial animation standard and other development to enable the creation, editing and playback of high resolution 3D models; MPEG-4 animation streams; and is compatible with well-known related systems such as Greta and Xface. It supports text-to-speech for dynamic speech synchronization. The framework enables realtime model simplification using quadric-based surfaces. Our coarticulation approach provides realistic and high performance lip-sync animation, based on Cohen-Massaro's model of coarticulation adapted to MPEG-4 facial animation (FA) specification. The preliminary experiments show that the coarticulation technique we have developed gives overall good and promising results when compared to related techniques.