Translingual Visemes Mapping for Lithuanian Speech Animation

Abstract

Methodology of Lithuanian phonemes visualization using visemes set of the base language appended by new visemes defined to animate specific Lithuanian phonemes is proposed. Translingual visemes mapping for Lithuanian speech animation is applied. Phoneme to viseme mapping module is one of the most important parts of the framework for Lithuanian speech animation. Facial animation engine compatible with MPEG-4 standard is used to integrate data flows. The base language of the exploited engine is English and the proposed architecture explains how it can be driven by Lithuanian phonetics to get samples of animated Lithuanian speech. Translingual phoneme to viseme mapping module offered in this paper is suitable to animate foreign languages. Ill. 2, bibl. 14, tabl. 1 (in English; abstracts in English and Lithuanian).http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.eee.111.5.365

Integration of Ohman and Rule-based Coarticulation Models for Visualization of Pure Lithuanian Diphtongs

“…Six of them employ adapted Ohman coarticulation control model to define expressiveness parameter of visemes and the rest of them exploit linear interpolation between expressiveness parameter of visemes. The proposed integration of Ohman and Rule-based coarticulation models was applied in rule-based Lithuanian speech animation engine [2]. Comparison of visemes expressivity before and after integration of the proposed rules proved that intelligibility of animated Lithuanian words with pure Lithuanian diphthongs noticeably increased.…”

“…miegas, saulė, eisena), so visualization of these diphthongs requires additional attention; especially when English speech animation engine is used to animate Lithuanian speech. Architecture of Lithuanian speech animation engine was presented in [2].…”

“…Translingual speech animation can be applied to save resources and to integrate a talking head based on phonetics in foreign language. For instance, visual similarity of Lithuanian and English phonemes was used to animate Lithuanian speech using English speech animation engine [2].…”

Viseme Recognition System Based on Transformed Acoustic Models

“…Advanced human computer interfaces may include a virtual assistant [1] to achieve natural communication with the user. The virtual assistant is frequently visualized by facial animation in the form of a talking head [2], [3]. The perceptual quality of human-computer interaction can be improved if gestures [4] and various other characteristics of communication [5], [6] are included in the virtual assistant.…”

“…If a speech synthesis module is used for generating the speech signal, a viseme sequence with time boundaries can be produced using mapping from the phoneme sequence, which is usually an intermediate result of a speech synthesis algorithm [9]. If the recorded or live speech signal is used for the talking head's spoken modality, viseme recognition must be carried out in order to produce a viseme sequence with time information [10]. The research presented in this paper focuses on the second case, Manuscript received February 28, 2013; accepted June 4, 2013.…”