Visual speech synthesis from 3D mesh sequences driven by combined speech features

Given a pre-registered 3D mesh sequence and accompanying phoneme-labeled audio, our system creates an animatable face model and a mapping procedure to produce realistic speech animations for arbitrary speech input. Mapping of speech features to model parameters is done using random forests for regression. We propose a new speech feature based on phonemic labels and acoustic features. The novel feature produces more expressive facial animation and it robustly handles temporal labeling errors. Furthermore, by employing a sliding window approach to feature extraction, the system is easy to train and allows for low-delay synthesis. We show that our novel combination of speech features improves visual speech synthesis. Our findings are confirmed by a subjective user study.