Patent ID: 7388586

Claim:
A computer-readable medium having stored thereon instructions, which when executed in a system cause the generation of an animated image, wherein the generation comprises: determining a set of key points of the lips of a human speaker; recording the positions of the key points on video data that includes the human speaker speaking chosen words; clustering various lip shapes of the human speaker into a class of lip shape; generating a mapping table, including mapping transitions of key points for the class of lip shape to the speaker speaking a tri-phoneme of a chosen word; and generating a frame list based on the mapping table and a speech rate from an audio, including defining multiple features from the key points, wherein a feature is a ratio of two dimensions of facial features, and generating all tri-phonemes in a set of tri-phonemes from available video data, including dividing the tri-phonemes into three levels, wherein a first level includes tri-phonemes in the set of tri-phonemes that are included in data from the video, a second level includes tri-phonemes in the set of tri-phonemes that can be mapped into the first level based on a phoneme-viseme relation, and a third level includes all of the tri-phonemes in the set of tri-phonemes that cannot be mapped.