MOTHER: a new generation of talking heads providing a flexible articulatory control for video-realistic speech animation

This article presents the first version of a talking head, called MOTHER (MOrphable Talking Head for Enhanced Reality), based on an articulatory model describing the degrees-offreedom of visible (lips, cheeks...) but also partially or indirectly visible (jaw, tongue...) speech articulators. Skin details are rendered using texture mapping/blending techniques. We illustrate here the flexibility of such an articulatory control of video-realistic speaking faces by first demonstrating its ability in tracking facial movements by an optical-to-articulatory inversion using an analysis-by-synthesis technique. The stability and reliability of the results allow the automatic inversion of large video sequences. Inversion results are here used to build automatically a coarticulation model for the generation of facial movements from text. It improves the previous Text-ToAudioVisual-Speech (TTAVS) synthesizer developed at the ICP both in terms of the accuracy and realism.