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.