Trainable videorealistic speech animation

I describe how to create with machine learning techniques a generative, videorealistic, speech animation module. A human subject is first recorded using a videocamera as he/she utters a pre-determined speech corpus. After processing the corpus automatically, a visual speech module is learned from the data that is capable of synthesizing the human subject's mouth uttering entirely novel utterances that were not recorded in the original video. The synthesized utterance is re-composited onto a background sequence which contains natural head and eye movement. The final output is videorealistic in the sense that it looks like a video camera recording of the subject. At run time, the input to the system can be either real audio sequences or synthetic audio produced by a text-to-speech system, as long as they have been phonetically aligned. The two key contributions of this work are * a variant of the multidimensional morphable model (MMM) [4] [26] [25] to synthesize new, previously unseen mouth configurations from a small set of mouth image prototypes, * a trajectory synthesis technique based on regularization, which is automatically trained from the recorded video corpus, and which is capable of synthesizing trajectories in MMM space corresponding to any desired utterance. Results are presented on a series of numerical and psychophysical experiments designed to evaluate the synthetic animations.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Ezzat, Tony F. (Tony Farid)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Tomaso Poggio.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8020

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8020