Dynamic Chinese viseme model based on phones and control function

Abstract

The aspirate and pronunciation of a Chinese syllable is similar to an `olivary nucleus` and syllables are mildly connected by coarticulation. Accordingly a dynamic viseme model is presented. Inner-syllable visemes are described by initial-final phones, and inter-syllable visemes are determined by a hierarchical control function. Experimental results show improvement in naturalness of lip animation, as compared to the visual speech synthesis system based on triphones.