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Automatic Viseme Clustering for Audiovisual Speech Synthesis Authors: W. Mattheyses, L. Latacz and W. Verhelst Publication Date: Aug. 2011 Pages: 2173-2176
Abstract: A common approach in visual speech synthesis is the use of visemes as atomic units of speech. In this paper, phoneme-based and viseme-based audiovisual speech synthesis techniques are compared in order to explore the balancing between data availability and an improved audiovisual coherence for synthesis optimization. A technique for automatic viseme clustering is described and it is compared to the standardized viseme set described in MPEGdž. Both objective and subjective testing indicated that a phoneme-based approach leads to better synthesis results. In addition, the test results improve when more different visemes are defined. This raises some questions on the widely applied viseme-based approach. It appears that a many-to-one phoneme-to-viseme mapping is not capable of describing all subtle details of the visual speech information. In addition, with viseme-based synthesis the perceived synthesis quality is affected by the loss of audiovisual coherence in the synthetic speech. External Link.
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