Abstract. Previous work in speech-driven head motion synthesis is centred around Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based methods and data that does not show a large variability of expressiveness in both speech and motion. When using expressive data, these systems often fail to produce satisfactory results. Recent studies have shown that using deep neural networks (DNNs) results in a better synthesis of head motion, in particular when employing bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM). We present a novel approach which makes use of DNNs with stacked bottleneck features combined with a BLSTM architecture to model context and expressive variability. Our proposed DNN architecture outperforms conventional feed-forward DNNs and simple BLSTM networks in an objective evaluation. Results from a subjective evaluation show a significant improvement of the bottleneck architecture over feed-forward DNNs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.