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Abstract

The disclosed invention takes advantage of the fact that the speech information and processing needed for successful animation lip-synching is actually much less than the information and processing which is needed for identifying individual words, as in the traditional speech recognition task, The disclosed embodiment utilizes linear prediction to obtain speech parameters which can be used to identify phonemes from a limited set corresponding to visually distinctive mouth positions. In the disclosed embodiment there is set forth an apparatus for producing lip-synching for a spoken sound track. Means are provided for storing, for each of a number of mouth positions, an unvoiced phonetic information representation associated with a mouth position. Means, responsive to samples of sound from the sound track, are provided for generating unvoiced phonetic information signals for the samples. Further means are provided for comparing the unvoiced phonetic information signals with the stored unvoiced phonetic information representations to determine which of the stored representations most closely matches the unvoiced phonetic information signals. The determined representations are then stored in time correspondence with the sound track.

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First Claim