Towards video realistic synthetic visual speech

In this paper we present initial work towards a video-realistic visual speech synthesiser based on statistical models of shape and appearance. A synthesised image sequence corresponding to an utterance is formed by concatenation of synthesis units (in this case phonemes) from a pre-recorded corpus of training data. A smoothing spline is applied to the concatenated parameters to ensure smooth transitions between frames and the resultant parameters applied to the model—early results look promising.