An investigation into the generation of mouth shapes for a talking head

BT is currently developing a low computation, real time, talking head as an adjunct to the Laureate text-to-speech system. Research into the development of a talking head may be divided into two components; image generation, and face and head movement control. The paper concentrates on the latter. A significant aspect of this work is research into methods of generating convincing mouth shapes when the head is talking. The paper describes a real time method of visual speech generation, which takes into consideration major coarticulation effects. It provides a detailed description of the generation process and compares this with a method of visual speech generation proposed by Cohen and Massaro (1992).