Korean speech recognition using phonemics for lip-sync animation

A speaker dependent voice recognition algorithm has been developed for producing an autonomic natural animating of the character' s mouth shape for small and medium sized animation productions or e-learning contents productions. Since the basic technique for recognizing Korean speech has been based on research results of other languages such as English and Japanese, it should check once at least or a margin for applying the Korean vocal sound system. One of reason is that Korean phonemes always have a same phonetic value. However, the scope of this study is the recognition of single vowels for a digital contents producing, particularly lip sync animation, since the lip sync producing generally requires lots of tedious hand work of animators and it seriously affects the animation producing cost and development period to get a high quality of lip animation. In this research, a real time processed automatic lip sync algorithm for virtual characters as the animation key in digital contents is studied by considering Korean vocal sound system. The proposed algorithm contributes to produce a natural condonable lip animation with the lower producing cost and the shorter development period. The recognition process consists of speech signal as the input, filtering, Fast Fourier Transform and identification. The result shows the proposed speaker dependent single vowel recognition system is able to distinguish Korean single vowels from dialogue of a dubbing artist with real-time. The average of the recognition ratio was 97.3% in the laboratory environment.