A Real-time Speech Driven Talking Avatar based on Deep Neural Network

This paper describes our initial work in developing a real-time speech driven talking avatar system with deep neural network. The input of the system is the acoustic speech and the output is the articulatory movements (that are synchronized with the input speech) on a 3-dimentional avatar. The mapping from the input acoustic features to the output articulatory features is achieved by virtue of deep neural network (DNN). Experiments on the well known acoustic-articulatory English speech corpus MNGU0 demonstrate that the proposed audio-visual mapping method based on DNN can achieve good performance.