Patent ID: 6661418
Filing Date: 2003-12-09
Classification: G06T,G10L

Abstract:
A method of generating an animated image of at least a head of a character which is speaking, the character's face having visible articulation matching words being spoken, the method comprising:(a) processing an input stream of marked up text comprising text to be spoken by an animated character and a plurality of mark up instructions representing behavioural features to be implemented in the animated character, so as to replace recognisable ones of said mark up instructions with predefined modified mark up instructions, so as to convert said input stream of marked up text into a modified output stream of marked up text; (b) processing said modified output stream of marked up text using randomising means so as to insert additional randomly selected mark up instructions into said modified output stream of marked up text, said randomly selected mark up instructions representing random behavioural features to be implemented in the animated character; (c) processing said modified output stream of marked up text, with said additional randomly inserted mark-up instructions inserted therein, so as to produce: an audio signal stream for use in generating an audio signal representing said text being spoken; a phoneme signal stream representing a sequence of phonemes corresponding to successive portions of the audio signal; and a mark up instruction stream comprising mark up instructions for use in other processing phases of the method; (d) processing said phoneme stream using phoneme-to-viseme mapping means so as to produce a morph target stream representing a series of morph targets, where a morph target comprises a predefined shape of the head of the character, wherein each said morph target in the series comprises a viseme, where a viseme comprises a predefined shape of the face containing a mouth of the character in a predetermined mouth shape matching a said phoneme; (e) modifying said morph target stream using mark-up instructions contained in said mark-up instruction stream so as to produce a modified morph target stream representing a modified series of morph targets comprising said series of visemes having at least one further morph target inserted therein; (f) processing said modified morph target stream, and said mark-up instruction stream, so as to generate an animated image of at least the character's head, said animated image comprising a sequence of image frames including image frames showing the character's face in said predefined shapes corresponding to the morph targets in said modified morph target stream; and (g) displaying said animated image on a display means synchronously with generating said audio signal from said audio signal stream so that the animated character appears to speak, the movement of the mouth portion of the character's face matching the phonemes in the audio signal.