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Visual Speech Synthesis by Morphing Visemes

Published: 30 June 2000 Publication History

Abstract

We present MikeTalk, a text-to-audiovisual speech synthesizer which converts input text into an audiovisual speech stream. MikeTalk is built using visemes, which are a small set of images spanning a large range of mouth shapes. The visemes are acquired from a recorded visual corpus of a human subject which is specifically designed to elicit one instantiation of each viseme. Using optical flow methods, correspondence from every viseme to every other viseme is computed automatically. By morphing along this correspondence, a smooth transition between viseme images may be generated. A complete visual utterance is constructed by concatenating viseme transitions. Finally, phoneme and timing information extracted from a text-to-speech synthesizer is exploited to determine which viseme transitions to use, and the rate at which the morphing process should occur. In this manner, we are able to synchronize the visual speech stream with the audio speech stream, and hence give the impression of a photorealistic talking face.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)SelfTalk: A Self-Supervised Commutative Training Diagram to Comprehend 3D Talking FacesProceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia10.1145/3581783.3611734(5292-5301)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
  • (2023)LipLearner: Customizable Silent Speech Interactions on Mobile DevicesProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581465(1-21)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2021)PTeacher: a Computer-Aided Personalized Pronunciation Training System with Exaggerated Audio-Visual Corrective FeedbackProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445490(1-14)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
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Published In

cover image International Journal of Computer Vision
International Journal of Computer Vision  Volume 38, Issue 1
special issue on learning and vision at the center for biological and computational learning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
June 2000
82 pages
ISSN:0920-5691
Issue’s Table of Contents

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Kluwer Academic Publishers

United States

Publication History

Published: 30 June 2000

Author Tags

  1. computer vision
  2. facial animation
  3. facial modelling
  4. lip synchronization
  5. machine learning
  6. morphing
  7. optical flow
  8. speech synthesis

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  • (2023)SelfTalk: A Self-Supervised Commutative Training Diagram to Comprehend 3D Talking FacesProceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia10.1145/3581783.3611734(5292-5301)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
  • (2023)LipLearner: Customizable Silent Speech Interactions on Mobile DevicesProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581465(1-21)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2021)PTeacher: a Computer-Aided Personalized Pronunciation Training System with Exaggerated Audio-Visual Corrective FeedbackProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445490(1-14)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
  • (2019)You Said That?: Synthesising Talking Faces from AudioInternational Journal of Computer Vision10.1007/s11263-019-01150-y127:11-12(1767-1779)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2019
  • (2017)A review on data-driven learning of a talking head modelInternational Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications10.1504/IJISTA.2017.08423916:2(169-190)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2017
  • (2016)High-fidelity facial and speech animation for VR HMDsACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/2980179.298025235:6(1-14)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2016
  • (2016)Labeled Graph Kernel for Behavior AnalysisIEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence10.1109/TPAMI.2015.248140438:8(1640-1650)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2016
  • (2016)Emotional head motion predicting from prosodic and linguistic featuresMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-016-3405-375:9(5125-5146)Online publication date: 1-May-2016
  • (2016)A deep bidirectional LSTM approach for video-realistic talking headMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-015-2944-375:9(5287-5309)Online publication date: 1-May-2016
  • (2015)Video-audio driven real-time facial animationACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/2816795.281812234:6(1-10)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2015
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