Interaction with a talking head

Abstract

Nowadays 3D technologies grow with the high speed and become more and more popular every day. Facial animation and modeling is the one part of these technologies that is attractive for research in 3D Industry. 3D Talking Heads with speech capabilities for real-time interaction are inevitable for game and other applications related to customer service, chat, entertainment, security, remote control, medicine, e-learning and etc.

This project is aimed to enhance the features of 3D Talking Head application – XFace, an open-source toolkit for 3D facial and speech animation. The main requirement for the project is to integrate the speech recognition engine in the application, and try to use it as the mean of input for control and interaction with a 3D head as well as application itself.

This report includes detailed description of the process of implementation of speech recognition required for interaction with a 3D head as well as command/control ability of application. Moreover, all studies and research done prior to the development are discussed in this paper. Speech recognition and 3D facial animation technologies are explained in detail as a part of literature review and requirements analysis.