Synthetic audiovisual storyteller

摘要

A method of animating a head and displaying text of an electronic book, whereby the head has a mouth which moves in synch with an audio sound of the text being displayed thus lip-syncing the words, the method comprises steps of inputting the text of said book; dividing said input text into a sequence of acoustic units; determining expression characteristics for the inputted text; calculating a duration for each acoustic unit using a duration model; converting said acoustic units to image vectors using a statistical model, which define a face of said head; converting said acoustic units into a sequence of text display indicators using a text display model; outputting said sequence of image vectors as video; wherein said selected expression is expressed as a weighted sum of parameters of the same type, and wherein the weighting used is expression dependent; and outputting 105 said sequence of text display indicators as video which is synchronised with the lip movement of the mouth and movement of the head and face. Sound effects may also be included