Translingual visual speech synthesis

Audio-driven facial animation is an interesting and evolving technique for human-computer interaction. Based on an incoming audio stream, a face image is animated with full lip synchronization. This requires a speech recognition system in the language in which audio is provided to get the time alignment for the phonetic sequence of the audio signal. However, building a speech recognition system is data intensive and is a very tedious and time consuming task. We present a novel scheme to implement a language independent system for audio-driven facial animation given a speech recognition system for just one language, in our case, English. The method presented here can also be used for text to audio-visual speech synthesis