16,084 research outputs found
Artimate: an articulatory animation framework for audiovisual speech synthesis
We present a modular framework for articulatory animation synthesis using
speech motion capture data obtained with electromagnetic articulography (EMA).
Adapting a skeletal animation approach, the articulatory motion data is applied
to a three-dimensional (3D) model of the vocal tract, creating a portable
resource that can be integrated in an audiovisual (AV) speech synthesis
platform to provide realistic animation of the tongue and teeth for a virtual
character. The framework also provides an interface to articulatory animation
synthesis, as well as an example application to illustrate its use with a 3D
game engine. We rely on cross-platform, open-source software and open standards
to provide a lightweight, accessible, and portable workflow.Comment: Workshop on Innovation and Applications in Speech Technology (2012
Relating Objective and Subjective Performance Measures for AAM-based Visual Speech Synthesizers
We compare two approaches for synthesizing visual speech using Active Appearance Models (AAMs): one that utilizes acoustic features as input, and one that utilizes a phonetic transcription as input. Both synthesizers are trained using the same data and the performance is measured using both objective and subjective testing. We investigate the impact of likely sources of error in the synthesized visual speech by introducing typical errors into real visual speech sequences and subjectively measuring the perceived degradation. When only a small region (e.g. a single syllable) of ground-truth visual speech is incorrect we find that the subjective score for the entire sequence is subjectively lower than sequences generated by our synthesizers. This observation motivates further consideration of an often ignored issue, which is to what extent are subjective measures correlated with objective measures of performance? Significantly, we find that the most commonly used objective measures of performance are not necessarily the best indicator of viewer perception of quality. We empirically evaluate alternatives and show that the cost of a dynamic time warp of synthesized visual speech parameters to the respective ground-truth parameters is a better indicator of subjective quality
Towards responsive Sensitive Artificial Listeners
This paper describes work in the recently started project SEMAINE, which aims to build a set of Sensitive Artificial Listeners – conversational agents designed to sustain an interaction with a human user despite limited verbal skills, through robust recognition and generation of non-verbal behaviour in real-time, both when the agent is speaking and listening. We report on data collection and on the design of a system architecture in view of real-time responsiveness
Hierarchical Cross-Modal Talking Face Generationwith Dynamic Pixel-Wise Loss
We devise a cascade GAN approach to generate talking face video, which is
robust to different face shapes, view angles, facial characteristics, and noisy
audio conditions. Instead of learning a direct mapping from audio to video
frames, we propose first to transfer audio to high-level structure, i.e., the
facial landmarks, and then to generate video frames conditioned on the
landmarks. Compared to a direct audio-to-image approach, our cascade approach
avoids fitting spurious correlations between audiovisual signals that are
irrelevant to the speech content. We, humans, are sensitive to temporal
discontinuities and subtle artifacts in video. To avoid those pixel jittering
problems and to enforce the network to focus on audiovisual-correlated regions,
we propose a novel dynamically adjustable pixel-wise loss with an attention
mechanism. Furthermore, to generate a sharper image with well-synchronized
facial movements, we propose a novel regression-based discriminator structure,
which considers sequence-level information along with frame-level information.
Thoughtful experiments on several datasets and real-world samples demonstrate
significantly better results obtained by our method than the state-of-the-art
methods in both quantitative and qualitative comparisons
- …