A Speech Driven Talking Head System Based on a Single Face Image

In this paper, a lifelike talking head system is proposed. The talking head, which is driven by speaker independent speech recognition, requires only one single face image to synthesize lifelike facial expression. The proposed system uses speech recognition engines to get utterances and corresponding time stamps in the speech data. Associated facial expressions can be fetched from an expression pool and the synthetic facial expression can then be synchronized with speech. When applied to Internet, our web-enabled talking head system can be a vivid merchandise narrator, and only requires 50 K bytes/minute with an additional face image (about 40Kbytes in CIF format, 24 bit-color, JPEG compression). The system can synthesize facial animation more than 30 frames/sec on a Pentium II 266 MHz PC.