Abstract

Rigid head motion is a gesture that conveys important nonverbal information in human communication, and hence it needs to be appropriately modeled and included in realistic facial animations to effectively mimic human behaviors. In this paper, head motion sequences in expressive facial animations are analyzed in terms of their naturalness and emotional salience in perception. Statistical measures are derived from an audiovisual database, comprising synchronized facial gestures and speech, which revealed characteristic patterns in emotional head motion sequences. Head motion patterns with neutral speech significantly differ from head motion patterns with emotional speech in motion activation, range, and velocity. The results show that head motion provides discriminating information about emotional categories. An approach to synthesize emotional head motion sequences driven by prosodic features is …

Date

2007

Authors

Carlos Busso, Zhigang Deng, Michael Grimm, Ulrich Neumann, Shrikanth Narayanan

Journal

IEEE transactions on audio, speech, and language processing

Volume

15

Issue

3

Pages

1075-1086

Publisher

IEEE