LUCIA, a new Italian talking head based on a modified version of the Cohen-Massaro’s labial coarticulation model is described. A semi-automatic minimization technique, working on real cinematic data, acquired by the ELITE optoelectronic system, was used to train the dynamic characteristics of the model. LUCIA is an MPEG-4 standard facial animation system working on standard FAP visual parameter...

As an alternative to synthesis-by-rule, the use of neural networks in speech synthesis has been successfully applied to prosody generation, yet it is not known precisely which input parameters are responsible for good results. The approach presented here tries to quantify the contribution of each input parameter. This is done first by comparing the mean errors of networks trained with only one ...

The generation of a pleasant pitch contour is an important issue for the naturalness of each TTS system. Till now the results are far from being satisfactory. In this paper we present a speakerand task specific approach realized by a neural network. Personal and task specific characteristics are maintained and the demand of gcneralization decreases. So the results in application can signilicant...

In order to speed-up the procedure for building an emotive/expressive talking head such as LUCIA, an integrated software called INTERFACE was designed and implemented in Matlab©. INTERFACE simplifies and automates many of the operations needed for that purpose. A set of processing tools, focusing mainly on dynamic articulatory data physically extracted by an automatic optotracking 3D movement a...

This paper describes our initial work in developing a real-time audio-visual Chinese speech synthesizer with a 3D expressive avatar. The avatar model is parameterized according to the MPEG-4 facial animation standard [1]. This standard offers a compact set of facial animation parameters (FAPs) and feature points (FPs) to enable realization of 20 Chinese visemes and 7 facial expressions (i.e. 27...

This paper describes the design of a neural network that performs the phonetic-to-acoustic mapping in a speech synthesis system. The use of a time-domain neural network architecture limits discontinuities that occur at phone boundaries. Recurrent data input also helps smooth the output parameter tracks. Independent testing has demonstrated that the voice quality produced by this system compares...

Parametric dynamical systems emerge as a formalism for modeling natural and engineered ranging from biology, epidemiology, medicine to cyber-physics. Parameter tuning is complex task usually performed exploiting heavy simulations having high computational complexity not ensuring the correctness of synthesized systems. We consider problem parameter synthesis discrete-time polynomial propose form...