Coarticulation and speech synchronization in MPEG-4 based facial animation

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a novel coarticulation and speech synchronization framework compliant with MPEG-4 facial animation (FA). Design/methodology/approach – The system the authors have developed uses MPEG-4 FA 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 real-time model simplification using quadric-based surfaces. Findings – The preliminary experiments show that the coarticulation technique the authors have developed gives overall good and promising results when compared to related techniques. Originality/value – The coarticulation approach provides realistic and high performance lip-sync animation, based on Cohen-Massaro's model of coarticulation adapted to MPEG-4 FA specification.