An online speech driven talking head system

This paper presents the design and implementation of an online speech driven talking head animation system. The system first recognizes phoneme sequence from the input speech with a Chinese Mandarin speech recognizer. The phoneme sequence is further transformed to a sequence of visemes. The sequence of MPEG-4 facial animation parameters (FAPs) is further derived from the viseme sequence, and is used to drive the facial animations on a 3-dimentional talking head. The architecture and the major features are also presented in the paper, together with the evaluations of the system.