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 mouth;dividing said input into a sequence of acoustic units;selecting an expression to be output by said head;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 for a selected expression, 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 the image parameters define the face of a head using an appearance model comprising a plurality of shape modes and a corresponding plurality of appearance modes, wherein the shape modes define a mesh of vertices which represents points of the face of said head and the appearance modes represent colours of pixels of the said face, the face being generated by combining a weighted sum of shape modes and a weighted sum of appearance modes, the weighting being provided by said image parameters.

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First Claim