INTERFACE: a New Tool for Building Emotive/Expressive Talking Heads

In order to speed-up the procedure for building an emotive/expressive talking head such as LUCIA, an integrated software called INTERFACE was designed and implemented in Matlab©. INTERFACE simplifies and automates many of the operations needed for that purpose. A set of processing tools, focusing mainly on dynamic articulatory data physically extracted by an automatic optotracking 3D movement analyzer, was implemented in order to build up the animation engine, that is based on the Cohen-Massaro coarticulation model, and also to create the correct WAV and FAP files needed for the animation. LUCIA, our animated MPEG-4 talking face, in fact, can copy a real human by reproducing the movements of some markers positioned on his face and recorded by an optoelectronic 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 an Italian version of FESTIVAL - MBROLA packages, modified for expressive/emotive synthesis by means of an appropriate APML/VSML tagged language.