Towards a low bandwidth talking face using appearance models

Barry-John Theobald, Silko Kruse, J. Andrew Bangham, Gavin C. Cawley

Abstract: This paper is motivated by the need to develop low bandwidth virtual humans capable of delivering audio-visual speech and sign language at a quality comparable to high bandwidth video. Using an appearance model combined with parameter compression significantly reduces the number of bits required for animating the face of a virtual human. A perceptual method is used to evaluate the quality of the synthesised sequences and it appears that 3.6 kb s−1 can yield acceptable quality.