Patent Document ID: 20140210830
Application ID: 14167238
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A method of animating a computer generation of a head, the head having a mouth which moves in accordance with speech to be output by the head, said method comprising: providing an input related to the speech which is to be output by the movement of the lips; dividing said input into a sequence of acoustic units; selecting expression characteristics for the inputted text; converting said sequence of acoustic units to a sequence of image vectors using a statistical model, wherein said model has a plurality of model parameters describing probability distributions which relate an acoustic unit to an image vector, said image vector comprising a plurality of parameters which define a face of said head; and outputting said sequence of image vectors as video such that the mouth of said head moves to mime the speech associated with the input text with the selected expression, wherein a parameter of a predetermined type of each probability distribution in said selected expression is expressed as a weighted sum of parameters of the same type, and wherein the weighting used is expression dependent, such that converting said sequence of acoustic units to a sequence of image vectors comprises retrieving the expression dependent weights for said selected expression, wherein the parameters are provided in clusters, and each cluster comprises at least one sub-cluster, wherein said expression dependent weights are retrieved for each cluster such that there is one weight per sub-cluster.