Abdennour El Rhalibi
Liverpool John Moores University, UK
Title: Coarticulation and Speech Synchronization in MPEG-4 Based Facial Animation
Biography
Biography: Abdennour El Rhalibi
Abstract
In this talk, Prof. Abdennour El Rhalibi will present an overview of his research in game technologies at LJMU. He will present some recent projects developed with BBC R&D, on game middleware development and in facial animation. In particular he will introduce a novel framework for coarticulation and speech synchronization for MPEG-4 based facial animation. The system, known as Charisma, enables 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 also enables real-time model simplification using quadric-based surfaces. The coarticulation approach provides realistic and high performance lip-sync animation, based on Cohen-Massaro\'s model of coarticulation adapted to MPEG-4 facial animation (FA) specification. He will also discuss some experiments which show that the coarticulation technique gives overall good results when compared to related state-of-the-art techniques.