Towards Realistic Real Time Speech-Driven Facial Animation

In this work we concentrate on finding correlation between speech signal and occurrence of facial gestures with the goal of creating believable virtual humans. We propose a method to implement facial gestures as a valuable part of human behavior and communication. Information needed for the generation of the facial gestures is extracted from speech prosody by analyzing natural speech in real time. This work is based on the previously developed HUGE architecture for statistically based facial gesturing, and extends our previous work on automatic real time lip sync.