Modeling Coarticulation in Synthetic Visual Speech

Abstract

After describing the importance of visual information in speech perception and sketching the history of visual speech synthesis, we consider a number of theories of coarticulation in human speech. An implementation of Lo .. fqvist's (1990) gestural theory of speech production is described for visual speech synthesis along with a description of the graphically controlled development system. We conclude with some plans for future work. Keywords: facial animation, speech, coarticulation 1. INTRODUCTION Our approach to the synthesis of visual speech starts with the study of speech perception. Much of what we know about speech perception has come from experimental studies using auditory synthetic speech. Synthetic speech gives the investigator control over the stimulus in a way that is not always possible using natural speech. Although the experimental validity of synthetic speech might be questioned, the phenomena uncovered using synthetic speech hold up when tested using natural speech..