Video-Realistic Image-based Eye Animation System

Abstract

In this work we elaborate on a novel image-based system for creating video-realistic eye animations to arbitrary spoken output. These animations are useful to give a face to multimedia applications such as virtual operators in dialog systems. Our eye animation system consists of two parts: eye control unit and rendering engine. The designed eye control unit is based on the statistical analysis of recorded human subjects. We design a new model, which fully automatically couples eye blinks and movements with phonetic as well as prosodic information extracted from spoken language. Subjective tests showed that participants are not able to distinguish between real eye motions and our animations, which has not been achieved before.