Computer graphics animations of talking faces based on stochastic models

Animated computer graphics displays of the visible speech gestures of the human face have a number of potential applications. The paper describes a novel method for their creation by bringing together two statistically-based techniques, namely hidden Markov modelling and principal component analysis. The animations are derived from images of a real speaker's face and incorporate all the visible features of the primary articulators, including the lips, teeth and tongue, in a graphical display which does not use an artificial facial model. A pilot 'video speech synthesiser' of this kind has been implemented and tested on spoken digit strings.<
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