Acoustic-visual synthesis technique using bimodal unit-selection
Slim Ouni, Vincent Colotte, Utpala Musti, Asterios Toutios, Brigitte Wrobel-Dautcourt, Marie‐Odile Berger, Caroline Lavecchia · EURASIP Journal on Audio Speech and Music Processing · 2013
This paper presents a bimodal acoustic-visual synthesis technique that concurrently generates the acoustic speech signal and a 3D animation of the speaker’s outer face. This is done by concatenating bimodal diphone units that consist of both acoustic and visual information. In the visual domain, we mainly focus on the dynamics of the face rather than on rendering. The proposed technique overcomes the problems of asynchrony and incoherence inherent in classic approaches to audiovisual synthesis. The different synthesis steps are similar to typical concatenative speech synthesis but are generalized to the acoustic-visual domain. The bimodal synthesis was evaluated using perceptual and subjective evaluations. The overall outcome of the evaluation indicates that the proposed bimodal acoustic-visual synthesis technique provides intelligible speech in both acoustic and visual channels.