Setup for Acoustic-Visual Speech Synthesis by Concatenating Bimodal Units

Asterios Toutios (1) , Utpala Musti (1) , Slim Ouni (1) , Vincent Colotte (1) , Brigitte Wrobel-Dautcourt (2) , Marie-Odile Berger (2)

1 PAROLE - Analysis, perception and recognition of speech
2 MAGRIT - Visual Augmentation of Complex Environments

This paper presents preliminary work on building a system able to synthesize concurrently the speech signal and a 3D animation of the speaker's face. This is done by concatenating bimodal diphone units, that is, units that comprise both acoustic and visual information. The latter is acquired using a stereovision technique. The proposed method addresses the problems of asyn- chrony and incoherence inherent in classic approaches to au- diovisual synthesis. Unit selection is based on classic target and join costs from acoustic-only synthesis, which are augmented with a visual join cost. Preliminary results indicate the benefits of the approach, since both the synthesized speech signal and the face animation are of good quality. Planned improvements and enhancements to the system are outlined.

Mots clés: audiovisual speech synthesis; talking head; bimodal unit concatenation; diphones

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Synthèse d'image et réalité virtuelle [cs.GR]; Multimédia [cs.MM]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Asterios Toutios, Utpala Musti, Slim Ouni, Vincent Colotte, Brigitte Wrobel-Dautcourt, et al.. Setup for Acoustic-Visual Speech Synthesis by Concatenating Bimodal Units. Interspeech 2010, ISCA, Sep 2010, Makuhari, Chiba, Japan. pp.486-489. ⟨inria-00526766⟩