Personalized Unit Selection for an Image-based Facial Animation System

This paper describes an image-based facial animation system, which consists of the audiovisual analysis of a human subject and the synthesis of a photo-realistic facial animation. The unit selection algorithm selects for a given audio output the best mouth samples from the database by assigning two costs, the phonetic context and the visual distance between two consecutive samples. Here a novel approach to adapt the unit selection algorithm to an individual human subject is presented, such that a photo-realistic facial animation can be generated