A new tongue model based on muscle-control

Talking head system is an interactive virtual reality technique in human-computer interaction. During the development of talking head systems, the modeling of tongue has received little attention. One important reason is that tongue is an extremely complex organ; therefore it is rather complex to animate. However, tongue is important in realistic simulation of talking head systems. To model tongue realistically with acceptable computing resource, this paper presents a three dimensional muscle-controlled tongue model (MCTM). We adopt the approach from the surgery to classify tongue muscles into intrinsic and extrinsic ones. Two models are built for each kind of muscle. The intrinsic model is employed to control the deformation of tongue. And the extrinsic model is employed to control the holistic tongue movement. When the positions of these muscles are established, we can control tongue model to move side-to-side and change different shapes by using different muscle-shrinkages. The experiments show that this method can simulate typical tongue movements such as front raising and back raising.