Importance

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Abstract

A method of animating a computer generation of a head, the head having a mouth which moves in accordance with speech to be output by the head,

said method comprising:providing an input related to the speech which is to be output by the movement of the lips;dividing said input into a sequence of acoustic units;selecting expression characteristics for the inputted text;converting said sequence of acoustic units to a sequence of image vectors using a statistical model, wherein said model has a plurality of model parameters describing probability distributions which relate an acoustic unit to an image vector, said image vector comprising a plurality of parameters which define a face of said head; andoutputting said sequence of image vectors as video such that the mouth of said head moves to mime the speech associated with the input text with the selected expression,wherein a parameter of a predetermined type of each probability distribution in said selected expression is expressed as a weighted sum of parameters of the same type, and wherein the weighting used is expression dependent, such that converting said sequence of acoustic units to a sequence of image vectors comprises retrieving the expression dependent weights for said selected expression, wherein the parameters are provided in clusters, and each cluster comprises at least one sub-cluster, wherein said expression dependent weights are retrieved for each cluster such that there is one weight per sub-cluster.

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First Claim