Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co., Ltd.

Kokusai Denshin Denwa Kabushiki Kaisha

Norio Higuchi

Seiichi Yamamoto

Toru Shimizu

Atsushi Koike

Yoshinori Hatori

Masahide Kaneko

A picture synthesizing apparatus, and method for synthesizing a moving picture of a person's face having mouth-shape variations from a train of input characters, wherein the method steps comprise developing from the train of input character a train of phonemes, utilizing a speech synthesis technique outputting, for each phoneme, a corresponding vocal sound feature including articulation mode and its duration of each corresponding phoneme of the train of phonemes. Determining for each phoneme a mouth-shape feature corresponding to each phoneme on the basis of the corresponding vocal sound feature, the mouth-shape feature including the degree of opening of the mouth, the degree of roundness of the lips, the height of the lower jaw in a raised and a lowered position, and the degree to which the tongue is seen. Determining values of mouth-shape parameters, for each phoneme, for representing a concrete mouth-shape on the basis of the mouth-shape feature; and controlling the values of the mouth-shape parameters for each phoneme, for each frame of the moving picture in accordance with the duration of each phoneme, thereby synthesizing the moving picture having mouth-shape variations matched with a speech output audible in case of reading the train of input characters.

Mouth shape synthesizing

A speech synthesis system comprises an input terminal for accepting text code, accent code, and phrase code. The speech synthesis system further comprises a converter for converting the text code to speech parameters for speech synthesis; an accent commend generator coupled to an output of the converter for providing a train of accent commands; a phrase command generator coupled to an output of the converter for providing a train of phrase commands; an accent command buffer for storing the accent commands; a phrase command buffer for storing the phrase commands; an accent component calculator operably coupled to the accent command buffer for providing contour of pitch frequency by accent component; a phrase component calculator operably coupled to the phrase command buffer for providing contour of pitch frequency by phrase component; an adder for providing a sum of output signals from the accent component calculator and the phrase component calculator; a device for providing fundamental frequency of voicing which is coupled to an output of the adder; a speech synthesizer coupled to an output of the device for providing the fundamental frequency and output of the converter; and an output terminal coupled to an output of the speech synthesizer for providing synthesized speech to an external circuit.

Pitch frequency generation system in a speech synthesis system

A speech synthesizer that synthesizes speech by actuating a voice source and a filter which processes output of the voice source according to speech parameters in each successive short interval of time according to feature vectors which include formant frequencies, formant bandwidth, speech rate and so on. Each feature vector, or speech parameter is defined by two target points (r.sub.1, r.sub.2), and a value at each target point together with a connection curve between target points. A speech rate is defined by a speech rate curve which defines elongation or shortening of the speech rate, by start point (d.sub.1) of elongation (or shorteninng), end point (d.sub.2), and elongation ratio between d.sub.1 and d.sub.2. The ratios between the relative time of each speech parameter and absolute time are preliminarily calculated according to the speech rate table in each predetermined short interval.

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Saitama, Japan

Norio Higuchi