 In this paper, we propose a facial modeling technique based on the MPEG-4 Synthetic/Natural Hybrid Coding for automating frame sequence generation of a talking head. With the definition and animation parameters on a generic face object, the shape, textures and expressions of an adapted frontal face can generally be controlled and synchronized by the phonemes transcribed from plain text. By this developed facial modeling technique, it increases the intelligibility of an non-verbal facial

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... ication for potential audiovisual lip-synch application on news reporting, lip-reading for the hearing-impaired or the deaf, virtual meeting through internet, and Story Teller on Demand (STOD).