A Constraint-Based Approach to Visual Speech for a Mexican-Spanish Talking Head

Abstract EN

A common approach to produce visual speech is to interpolate the parameters describing a sequence of mouth shapes, known as visemes, where a viseme corresponds to a phoneme in an utterance.

The interpolation process must consider the issue of context-dependent shape, or coarticulation, in order to produce realistic-looking speech.

We describe an approach to such pose-based interpolation that deals with coarticulation using a constraint-based technique.

This is demonstrated using a Mexican-Spanish talking head, which can vary its speed of talking and produce coarticulation effects.