ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY and CENTER FOR BIOLOGICAL AND COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING DEPARTMENT OF BRAIN AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES

We present MikeTalk, a text-to-audiovisual speech synthesizer which converts input text into an audiovisual speech stream. MikeTalk is built using visemes, which are a small set of images spanning a large range of mouth shapes. The visemes are acquired from a recorded visual corpus of a human subject which is specifically designed to elicit one instantiation of each viseme. Using optical flow methods, correspondence from every viseme to every other viseme is computed automatically. By morphing along this correspondence, a smooth transition between viseme images may be generated. A complete visual utterance is constructed by concatenating viseme transitions. Finally, phoneme and timing information extracted from a text-to-speech synthesizer is exploited to determine which viseme transitions to use, and the rate at which the morphing process should occur. In this manner, we are able to synchronize the visual speech stream with the audio speech stream, and hence give the impression of a photorealistic talking face. Copyright c © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999 This report describers research done at the Center for Biological & Computational Learning and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This research was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research under contract No. N0001493-1-0385 and contract No. N00014-95-1-0600 under contract No. IIS-9800032. Additional support is provided by: AT&T, Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, Eastman Kodak Company, Daimler-Benz AG, Digital Equipment Corporation, Honda R&D Co., Ltd., NEC Fund, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, and Siemens Corporate Research, Inc.