Emphatic visual speech synthesis

  • Authors:
  • Javier Melenchón;Elisa Martínez;Fernando De La Torre;José A. Montero

  • Affiliations:
  • Estudis d’Informàtica, Multimèdia i Telecomunicació, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain;Grup de Recerca en Processament Multimodal, Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle, Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, Spain;Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Grup de Recerca en Processament Multimodal, Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle, Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona, Spain

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing - Special issue on multimodal processing in speech-based interactions
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The synthesis of talking heads has been a flourishing research area over the last few years. Since human beings have an uncanny ability to read people's faces, most related applications (e.g., advertising, video-teleconferencing) require absolutely realistic photometric and behavioral synthesis of faces. This paper proposes a person-specific facial synthesis framework that allows high realism and includes a novel way to control visual emphasis (e.g., level of exaggeration of visible articulatory movements of the vocal tract). There are three main contributions: a geodesic interpolation with visual unit selection, a parameterization of visual emphasis, and the design of minimum size corpora. Perceptual tests with human subjects reveal high realism properties, achieving similar perceptual scores as real samples. Furthermore, the visual emphasis level and two communication styles show a statistical interaction relationship.