High Quality Lip-Sync Animation for 3D Photo-Realistic Talking Head

We propose a new 3D photo-realistic talking head with high quality, lip-sync animation. It extends our prior high-quality 2D photo-realistic talking head to 3D. An a/v recording of a person speaking a set of prompted sentences with good phonetic coverage for ~20-minutes is first made. We then use a 2D-to-3D reconstruction algorithm to automatically adapt a general 3D head mesh model to the person. In training, super feature vectors consisting of 3D geometry, texture and speech are augmented together to train a statistical, multi-streamed, Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The HMM is then used to synthesize both the trajectories of head motion animation and the corresponding dynamics of texture. The resultant 3D talking head animation can be controlled by the model predicted geometric trajectory while the articulator movements, e.g., lips, are rendered with dynamic 2D texture image sequences. Head motions and facial expression can also be separately controlled by manipulating corresponding parameters. In a real-time demonstration, the life-like 3D talking head can take any input text, convert it into speech and render lipsynced speech animation photo-realistically