Coarticulation and speech synchronization in MPEG-4 based facial animation

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to present a novel coarticulation and speech synchronization framework compliant with MPEG-4 facial animation (FA).Design/methodology/approach– The system the authors have developed uses MPEG-4 FA standard and other development to enable the creation, editing and playback of high-resolution 3D models; MPEG-4 animation streams; and is compatible with well-known related systems such as Greta and Xface. It supports text-to-speech for dynamic speech synchronization. The framework enables real-time model simplification using quadric-based surfaces.Findings– The preliminary experiments show that the coarticulation technique the authors have developed gives overall good and promising results when compared to related techniques.Originality/value– The coarticulation approach provides realistic and high performance lip-sync animation, based on Cohen-Massaro's model of coarticulation adapted to MPEG-4 FA specification.