Realistic Lip Syncing for Virtual Character Using Common Viseme Set

Abstract

Speech is one of the most important interaction methods between the humans. Therefore, most of avatar researches focus on this area with significant attention. Creating animated speech requires a facial model capable of representing the myriad shapes the human face expressions during speech. Moreover, a method to produce the correct shape at the correct time is also in order. One of the main challenges is to create precise lip movements of the avatar and synchronize it with a recorded audio. This paper proposes a new lip synchronization algorithm for realistic applications, which can be employed to generate synchronized facial movements among the audio generated from natural speech or through a text-to-speech engine. This method requires an animator to construct animations using a canonical set of visemes for all pair wise combination of a reduced phoneme set. These animations are then stitched together smoothly to construct the final animation.

Foreign language visemes for use in lip-synching with computer-generated audio

“…Such systems are frequently referred to as "talking heads" in the scholar community (Mažonavičiūtė, I. & Baušys, 2009;Raheem Ali, Sulong, & Kolivand, 2015).That is an apt description of what the head is doing, and for the purposes of that research I suppose it is all they are concerned with, but the technology can be applied to much more than just a talking head. Every character in a video game is essentially a talking head that also just happens to have a body attached to it so it can do other things and make the game more fun, but the talking head is where the language normally comes out of a person, so that is the portion of the character we are concerned with when talking about speech synthesis and its visual representation.…”