Audio-to-visual conversion for multimedia communication

Although humans rely primarily on hearing to process speech, they can also extract a great deal of information with their eyes through lipreading. This skill becomes extremely important when the acoustic signal is degraded by noise. It would, therefore, be beneficial to find methods to reinforce acoustic speech with a synthesized visual signal for high noise environments. This paper addresses the interaction between acoustic speech and visible speech. Algorithms for converting audible speech into visible speech are examined, and applications which can utilize this conversion process are presented. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to animate a natural-looking talking head using acoustic speech as an input.