Automated lip-sync: Background and techniques

The problem of creating mouth animation synchronized to recorded speech is discussed. Review of a model of speech sound generation indicates that the automatic derivation of mouth movement from a speech soundtrack is a tractable problem. Several automatic lip-sync techniques are compared, and one method is described in detail. In this method a common speech synthesis method, linear prediction, is adapted to provide simple and accurate phoneme recognition. The recognized phonemes are associated with mouth positions to provide keyframes for computer animation of speech. Experience with this technique indicates that automatic lipsync can produce useful results.