Realistic facial animation system for interactive services

This paper presents the optimization of parameters of talking head for web-based applications with a talking head, such as Newsreader and E-commerce, in which the realistic talking head initiates a conversation with users. Our talking head system includes two parts: analysis and synthesis. The audiovisual analysis part creates a face model of a recorded human subject, which is composed of a personalized 3D mask as well as a large database of mouth images and their related information. The synthesis part generates facial animation by concatenating appropriate mouth images from the database. A critical issue of the synthesis is the unit selection which selects these appropriate mouth images from the database such that they match the spoken words of the talking head. In order to achieve a realistic facial animation, the unit selection has to be optimized. Objective criteria are proposed in this paper and the Pareto optimization is used to train the unit selection. Subjective tests are carried out in our web-based evaluation system. Experimental results show that most people cannot distinguish our facial animations from real videos.