In this paper, a system for speech-driven animation of generic 3D head models is presented. The system is based on the inversion of a joint Audio-Visual Hidden Markov Model to estimate the visual information from speech data. Estimated visual speech features are used to animate a simple face model. The animation of a more complex head model is then obtained by automatically mapping the deformation of the simple model to it. The proposed algorithm allows the animation of 3D head models of

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... ry complexity through a simple setup procedure. The resulting animation is evaluated in terms of intelligibility of visual speech through subjective tests, showing a promising performance.