English talking head adaptation for Lithuanian speech animation

Abstract

Visual speech animation plays an important role in human-computer interaction. To force already existing English Talking Head speech animation engine to talk Lithuanian, some modifications to the animation script were made. For this adaptation, the relation between English and Lithuanian languages was explored. To determine it, 30 3- dimensional Lithuanian visemes were modeled using the calibration of two orthogonal pictures of phoneme. Using the visual similarity of different English and Lithuanian phonemes, "Lithuanian phoneme to English viseme mapping table" was defined and used for Lithuanian speech animation.