Publication Details
Toolkit for Animation of Finnish Talking Head
Dobšík Martin, Ing., Ph.D. (DCGM FIT BUT)
Kätsyri Jari, M.Sc. (HUT)
Sams Mikko, Prof. (HUT)
talking head, artificial person, audiovisual speech synthesis, computer animation, facial animation
Article presents the animation system for audiovisual speech synthesis of Finnish language in detail. The system produces real-time video sequences of Finnish talking head. Detailed structure and used mathematical means are presented too. Mentioned is also evaluation process of this animation system, which is described in another publication.
We have designed and implemented a toolkit for real-time animation of virtual 3D talking head, "Artificial Person". Synchronized auditory and visual speech are automatically produced from input text, which can be enriched by user definable commands to perform specific gestures, as for example head nodding or facial expressions. The toolkit is extensible through external configuration files, so new actions can be quickly added. We have configured the Artificial Person to display facial expressions and phoneme articulations. Modular design of the toolkit allows to easily replace parts of the system or to detach and run them on different computers.
Our aim was to create a tool that can be used to produce realistic facial animation for creating controllable stimuli in psychophysical and neurophysiological research on audio-visual perception of speech and emotions.
@INPROCEEDINGS{FITPUB7254, author = "Michael Frydrych and Martin Dob\v{s}\'{i}k and Jari K{\"{a}}tsyri and Mikko Sams", title = "Toolkit for Animation of Finnish Talking Head", pages = "199--204", booktitle = "ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Audio Visual Speech Processing (AVSP'03)", journal = "International Conference on Audio-Visual Speech Processing", number = 9, year = 2003, location = "St Jorioz France, FR", publisher = "International Speech Communication Association", ISSN = "1680-8908", language = "english", url = "https://www.fit.vut.cz/research/publication/7254" }