Speech Animation Using Viseme Space

A method for realistic face animation is proposed. In particular it focuses on speech animation. When asked to animate a face it replicates the 3D ’visemes’ that it has learned from talking actors, and adds the necessary coarticulation effects. The speech animation could be based on as few as 16 modes, extracted through Independent Component Analysis from different face dynamics. The exact deformation fields that come with the different visemes are adapted by the system to take the shape of the given face into account. By localising the face to be animated in a face space, where also the locations of the neutral example faces are known, visemes are adapted automatically according to the relative distance with respect to these examples.