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In Instant Casting movie System, a personal CG character is automatically generated. The character resembles a participant in a face geometry and texture. However, the voice of a character was an alternative voice determined by the gender of the participant. Therefore sometimes it's not enough to identify the personality of a CG character. In this paper, an automatic pre-scored voice assignment tool for a personal CG character is presented. Voice is essential to identify a personal character as well as a face feature. Our proposed system selects the most similar voice to the participants from voice database, and assigns it as a voice of CG character. Voice similarity criterion is presented by combination of eight acoustic features. After assigning voice data to a personal character, the voice track is played back in synchronization with the movement of the CG character. 60 voice variations have been prepared to our voice database. Validity of the assigned voice has been evaluated by MOS value. The proposed method has achieved 68% of the theoretical figure that is calculated by preliminary experiments.

Future cast system is a new entertainment system where participant’s face is captured and rendered into the movie as an instant Computer Graphics (CG) movie star, which had been first exhibited at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi Japan. We are working to add new functionality which enables mapping not only faces but also speech individualities to the cast. Our approach is to find a speaker with the closest speech individuality and apply voice conversion. This paper investigates acoustic features to estimate perceptual similarity of speech individuality. We propose a method linearly combined eight acoustic features related to the perception of speech individualities. The proposed method optimizes weights for the acoustic features considering perceptual similarities. We have evaluated performance of our method with Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients to perceptual similarities. As the results, the experiments evidenced that the proposed method achieves a correlation coefficient of 0.66.

This paper proposes a universal user-friendly post-recording tool for an Instant Casting Movie System (ICS) that enables anyone to be a movie star using his or her own voice and faces. A personal CG character is automatically generated by scanning one's face geometry and image in ICS. Voice is as essential to identify a person as face. However, a character's voice is only based on gender in ICS. We proposed a novel voice recording tool for participants of all ages in a short time. Post-recording tasks are very difficult because speakers should speak in synchronization with the mouth movements of the CG characters. Therefore this task is generally recorded by professional voice actors. Our proposed tool has the following four features: 1) various supporting information for synchronization with voice and mouth movement timing for users; 2) automatic post-processing of recorded voices for compositing mixed audio; 3) intuitively displays operation for people of all ages; and 4) handles multiple users in parallel for quick recording. We developed a prototype speech synchronization system using a post-recording tool and conducted subjective evaluation experiments of it. Over 60% of the subjects responded that the tool's interface can be operated easily.

Abstract We propose a set of algorithms to efficiently make speech animation for 3D cartoon characters. Our prototype system is based on blendshapes, a linear interpolation technique, which is widely used in facial animation practice. In our system, a few base target shapes of the character, prerecorded voice, and its transcription are required as input. We describe a simple technique that amplifies the target shapes from few inputs using a generic database of viseme mouth shapes. We also introduce additional lip‐synch editing parameters that allow designers to quickly tune the lip movements. Based on these, we implement our prototype system as a Maya plug‐in. The demonstration movies created with this system illustrate well the practicality of our approach. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.