Emotional Talking Head: The Development of 'Lucia'

The aim of this work is that of reviewing the ISTC activities
focused on the development and implementation of LUCIA
a new Italian emotional talking head based on a modified
version of the Cohen-Massaro's labial coarticulation model.
LUCIA is an MPEG-4 standard
facial animation system
working on standard FAP visual parameters and speaking
with the Italian version of FESTIVAL TTS. LUCIA was
developed with the help of INTERFACE a Matlab©
integrated software created
to speed-up the procedure for
building an emotive/expressive talking head from real
human data. Various processing tools, working on dynamic
articulatory data physically extracted by an optotracking 3D
movement analyzer called ELITE, were implemented to
build the animation engine a
nd also to create the correct
WAV and FAP files needed for th
e animation. By the use of
INTERFACE, LUCIA, our animat
ed MPEG-4 talking face,
can copy a real human by reproducing the movements of
passive markers positioned on hi
s face and recorded by an
opto-electronic device, or can be directly driven by an
emotional XML tagged input text, thus realizing a true
audio/visual emotive/expressive synthesis. LUCIA's voice
is based on the ISTC Italian version of FESTIVAL -
MBROLA packages, modified
for expressive/emotive
synthesis by means of an appropriate APML/VSML tagged
language.