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Talking facial display method and apparatus

  • US 6,250,928 B1
  • Filed: 12/31/1998
  • Issued: 06/26/2001
  • Est. Priority Date: 06/22/1998
  • Status: Expired due to Term
First Claim
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1. A method of converting input text into an audio-visual speech stream comprising a talking face image enunciating the text, wherein said audio-visual speech stream comprises a plurality of phonemes and timing information, wherein the tallking face image is built using a plurality of visemes, the method comprising the steps of:

  • recording a visual corpus of a human-subject;

    extracting and defining a plurality of visemes from the recorded visual corpus, said visemes being defined by a set of images spanning a range of mouth shapes derived from the recorded visual corpus;

    building a viseme interpolation database, said database comprising a plurality of viseme images and at least one set of interpolation vectors that define a transition from each viseme image to every other viseme image, said viseme images in said interpolation database being a subset of said plurality of visemes extracted from said visual corpus, said set of interpolation vectors being computed automatically (i, in the absence of a definition of a set of high-level features and (ii) through the use of optical flow methods, said viseme interpolation database further comprising a corresponding set of intermediate viseme images automatically generated as a function of respective interpolation vectors; and

    synchronizing the talking face image with an input text stream by employing said interpolation vectors and viseme images contained in said interpolation database, said synchronizing resulting in giving the impression of a photo-realistic talking face.

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