Patent ID: 6665643
Filing Date: 2003-12-16
Classification: G06T,G10L

Abstract:
A method for the animation, driven by an audio signal, of a synthesized model of a human face, wherein a driving signal is converted into phonetic information readable by a machine and such phonetic information comprising individual phonetic information items is directly transformed into a predetermined group of parameters representative of elementary deformations to be directly applied to such a model through the following sequence of operations:(a) sequentially and directly associating said individual phonetic information items, one by one with respective information items in the form of visemes representative of a corresponding position of a mouth of the model, the visemes being chosen from within a set that includes visemes independent of a language of the driving audio signal and visemes specific for such a language; (b) splitting each viseme into a plurality of macroparameters that characterize shapes and positions of the lip region and of the jaw in the model, and associationg said plurality of macroparameters of a given viseme with intensity values representative of displacements from a neutral position and chosen within a interval determined in an initialization phase so as to ensure a good maturalness of the animated model; and (c) splitting said plurality of macroparameters into said predetermined group of parameters representative of deformations to be applied to the model, said predetermined group of parameters being chosen within a group of standard facial animation parameters relating to the mouth movements, each of said parameters being associated with intensity values which depend on the intensity values of the macroparameters and being chosen within an interval designed to guarantee the naturalness of the animated model, said group of visemes independent of the language and said group of standard facial animation parameters being the visemes and the facial animation parameters respectively defined by an ISO-IEC standard.