To support our research on ASL animation synthesis, we have adopted and enhanced a new virtual human animation platform that provides us with greater fine-grained control of facial movements than our previous platform. To determine whether this new platform is sufficiently expressive to generate understandable ASL animations, we analyzed responses collected from deaf participants who evaluated ...

Our overall goal is to produce as automatic as possible facial expressions with wrinkles from spoken input. We focus on two aspects of this problem: integration of the expressive wrinkles and generation of synchronized speechanimation. Our facial model integrates facial muscles deformations and bulges. We have produced a high level programming language to automatically drive 3D animation of fac...

In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness in conveying speech information of a speech synchronized facial animation system based on context-dependent visemes. The evaluation procedure is based on an oral speech intelligibility test conducted with, and without, supplementary visual information provided by a real and a virtual speaker. Three situations (audio-only, audio+video and audio+animati...

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 framewor...

We propose a method for automatically copying facial motion from one 3D face model to another, while preserving the compliance of the motion to the MPEG-4 FBA standard. Despite the enormous progress in the field of Facial Animation, producing a new animatable face from scratch is still a tremendous task for an artist. Although many methods exist to animate a face automatically based on procedur...

Facial expression analysis is an attractive, challenging and important field of study in facial analysis. It's important applications include many areas such as human–computer interaction, human emotion analysis, biometric authentication, exhaustion detection and data-driven animation. For successful facial expression recognition, the first step is to arrive at an appropriate facial repres...

Designing facial animation parameters according to a specific model can be time consuming. In this paper we present a fast approach to design facial animations based on minimal information (only feature points). All facial deformations are automatically computed from MPEG-4 feature points. We also present an extension of this approach that allows to personalize or to customize the deformations ...

This paper describes SynFace, a supportive technology that aims at enhancing audio-based spoken communication in adverse acoustic conditions by providing the missing visual information in the form of an animated talking head. Firstly, we describe the system architecture, consisting of a 3D animated face model controlled from the speech input by a specifically optimised phonetic recogniser. Seco...

Facial expressions reflect internal emotional states of a character or in response to social communications. Though much effort has been taken to generate realistic facial expressions, it still remains a challenging topic due to human being’s sensitivity to subtle facial movements. In this paper, we present a method for facial animation generation, which reflects true facial muscle movements w...