Premium
Audio‐driven emotional speech animation for interactive virtual characters
Author(s) -
Charalambous Constantinos,
Yumak Zerrin,
Stappen A. Frank
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
computer animation and virtual worlds
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.225
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1546-427X
pISSN - 1546-4261
DOI - 10.1002/cav.1892
Subject(s) - coarticulation , computer science , animation , computer facial animation , computer animation , viseme , character animation , skeletal animation , speech recognition , signal (programming language) , interactive skeleton driven simulation , speech synthesis , human–computer interaction , computer graphics (images) , speech technology , vowel , programming language
We present a procedural audio‐driven speech animation method for interactive virtual characters. Given any audio with its respective speech transcript, we automatically generate lip‐synchronized speech animation that could drive any three‐dimensional virtual character. The realism of the animation is enhanced by studying the emotional features of the audio signal and its effect on mouth movements. We also propose a coarticulation model that takes into account various linguistic rules. The generated animation is configurable by the user by modifying the control parameters, such as viseme types, intensities, and coarticulation curves. We compare our approach against two lip‐synchronized speech animation generators. Our results show that our method surpasses them in terms of user preference.