Audio-Visual Speech Asynchrony Modeling in a Talking Head

An audio-visual speech synthesis system with modeling of asynchrony between auditory and visual speech modalities is proposed in the paper. Corpus-based study of real recordings gave us the required data for understanding the problem of modalities asynchrony that is partially caused by the co-articulation phenomena. A set of context-dependent timing rules and recommendations was elaborated in order to make a synchronization of auditory and visual speech cues of the animated talking head similar to a natural humanlike way. The cognitive evaluation of the model-based talking head for Russian with implementation of the original asynchrony model has shown high intelligibility and naturalness of audio-visual synthesized speech.