Real-time facial action image synthesis system driven by speech and text

Automatic facial motion image synthesis schemes and a real-time system design are presented. The purpose of this scheme is to realize an intelligent human-machine interface or intelligent communication system with talking head images. A human face is reconstructed with 3D surface model and texture mapping technique on the display of terminal. Facial motion images are synthesized naturally by transformation of the lattice points on wire frames. Two types of motion drive methods, text to image conversion and speech to image conversion are proposed in this paper. In the former manner, the synthesized head can speak some given texts naturally and in the latter case, some mouth and jaw motions can be synthesized in time to speech signal of behind speaker. These schemes were implemented to a parallel image computer and a real-time image synthesizer could output facial motion images to the display as fast as video rate.