We present a procedural audio‐driven speech animation method for interactive virtual characters. Given any audio with its respective speech transcript, we automatically generate lip‐synchronized speech animation that could drive any three‐dimensional virtual character. The realism of the animation is enhanced by studying the emotional features of the audio signal and its effect on mouth movements. We also propose a coarticulation model that takes into account various linguistic rules. The generated animation is configurable by the user by modifying the control parameters, such as viseme types, intensities, and coarticulation curves. We compare our approach against two lip‐synchronized speech animation generators. Our results show that our method surpasses them in terms of user preference.

中文翻译：

---

用于交互式虚拟角色的音频驱动的情感语音动画

我们提出了一种用于交互式虚拟角色的程序音频驱动语音动画方法。给定任何带有各自语音转录的音频，我们会自动生成可以驱动任何 3D 虚拟角色的口型同步语音动画。通过研究音频信号的情感特征及其对嘴部运动的影响，增强了动画的真实感。我们还提出了一个考虑到各种语言规则的 coarticulation 模型。生成的动画可由用户通过修改控制参数来配置，例如视位类型、强度和关节曲线。我们将我们的方法与两个唇形同步语音动画生成器进行比较。我们的结果表明，我们的方法在用户偏好方面超过了他们。