Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment. 4th International ICST Conference, INTETAIN 2011, Genova, Italy, May 25-27, 2011, Revised Selected Papers

Research Article

LUCIA: An Open Source 3D Expressive Avatar for Multimodal h.m.i.

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-30214-5_21,
        author={G. Leone and Giulio Paci and Piero Cosi},
        title={LUCIA: An Open Source 3D Expressive Avatar for Multimodal h.m.i.},
        proceedings={Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment. 4th International ICST Conference, INTETAIN 2011, Genova, Italy, May 25-27, 2011, Revised Selected Papers},
        proceedings_a={INTETAIN},
        year={2012},
        month={10},
        keywords={talking head TTS facial animation mpeg4 3D avatar virtual agent affective computing LUCIA FESTIVAL},
        doi={10.1007/978-3-642-30214-5_21}
    }
    
  • G. Leone
    Giulio Paci
    Piero Cosi
    Year: 2012
    LUCIA: An Open Source 3D Expressive Avatar for Multimodal h.m.i.
    INTETAIN
    Springer
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-30214-5_21
G. Leone1,*, Giulio Paci1, Piero Cosi1,*
  • 1: Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies – National Research Council
*Contact email: riccardo.leone@pd.istc.cnr.it, piero.cosi@pd.istc.cnr.it

Abstract

LUCIA is an MPEG-4 facial animation system developed at ISTC-CNR. It works on standard Facial Animation Parameters and speaks with the Italian version of FESTIVAL TTS. To achieve an emotive/expressive talking head LUCIA was built from real human data physically extracted by ELITE optic-tracking movement analyzer. LUCIA can copy a real human being by reproducing the movements of passive markers positioned on his face and recorded by the ELITE device or can be driven by an emotional XML tagged input text, thus realizing true audio/visual emotive/expressive synthesis. Synchronization between visual and audio data is very important in order to create the correct WAV and FAP files needed for the animation. LUCIA’s voice is based on the ISTC Italian version of FESTIVAL-MBROLA packages, modified by means of an appropriate APML/VSML tagged language. LUCIA is available in two different versions: an open source framework and the “work in progress” WebGL.