Patent ID: 8224652

Claim:
A method for synthesizing animation motions, comprising steps for: providing a set of one or more animation models, each animation model providing a set of probabilistic motions of one or more body parts learned from acoustic features and speech prosody information extracted from a set of one or more audio/video training signals comprising synchronized speech and body motions; wherein the probabilistic motions of the animation models are constructed as individual “animation units” by modeling Euler angles of each modeled body part as a function of corresponding acoustic features and speech prosody information and generating full context labels for each animation unit; wherein two or more of the animation models are clustered using predictive analysis techniques to allow selection of animation units from multiple animation models to ensure that a smooth animation trajectory can be constructed from any selected animation units; receiving an arbitrary speech input synthesized from an arbitrary text input including one or more “emotion tags” associated with one or more portions of the arbitrary text input, said emotion tags being used to change emotional characteristics of the synthesized arbitrary speech input; evaluating the speech input to extract a set of acoustic features and speech prosody information from the speech input; predicting a sequence of the probabilistic motions to construct an animation trajectory which best explains the arbitrary speech input, by applying one or more of the set of animation models to the set of acoustic features and speech prosody information extracted from the arbitrary speech input; and generating an animation sequence from the predicted sequence of the probabilistic motions.