Patent ID: 7133535

Claim:
A computer-implemented process for synthesizing mouth motion to an audio signal, comprising the following process actions: training Hidden Markov Models using substantially continuous images of face sequences correlated with a speech audio signal wherein said training comprises: inputting a training video comprising both video and audio data, quantizing facial and vocal data from said video and audio data, excluding silent audio frames corresponding to video frames from further processing, wherein the process action of excluding silent frames comprises the process actions of: generating an energy histogram of each frame in a prescribed length of audio data, which results in two peaks, the first peak indicating the energy center of the silent frames, the second peak indicating the energy center of the voice frames; computing the average of the first and second peaks; using the average of the two peaks as a threshold to separate the audio frames into voice and silent frames, creating face states and face sequences from said facial and vocal data, and training Hidden Markov Models corresponding to said face states and said face sequences; and using said trained Hidden Markov Models to generate mouth motions for a given audio input.