An MPEG-4 Facial Animation System Driven by Synthetic Speech

This paper’ provides an overview o f the act iv i t ies that have led to the development o f a prototype appl icat ion o f a “talking head” compliant with MPEG-4 spectfication. The work done so far Jits in the context of one of the recent work-i tems def ined by the ISOBEC JTCI/SC29/WGll world-wide known as MPEG. This IS0 Working Group is now in the process o f de f in ing a uni fy ing framework where natural and synthet ic audiovisual objects can be combined and rendered as a unique bouquet of synchronised interactive media. The developed facial animation system implements the following features: animation of predefined / downloaded face models , animation of face models driven ei ther by speech synthesis appl icat ions or by MPEG-4 animation parameters. To improve photo-realism, face models can be texture mapped and calibrated according to the countenances of real people.