In this paper, we present a method for synthesizing photorealistic visual speech using a parametric model based on quadtree splines. In an image-based visual speech synthesis system, visemes are used for generating an arbitrary new image sequence. The images between visemes are usually synthesized using a certain mapping. Such a mapping can be characterized by motion parameters estimated from the training data. With the quadtree splines, we can minimize the number of motion parameters for a given synthetic error. The feasibility of the proposed method has been demonstrated by experiments. 1