Correct speech visemes as a root of total communication method for deaf people

Abstract

Many deaf people are using lip reading as a main communication fiorm. A viseme is a representational unit used to classify speech sounds in the visual domain and describes the particular facial and oral positions and movements that occur alongside the voicing of phonemes. A design tool for creating correct speech visemes is designed. It's composed of 5 modules; one module for creating phonemes, one module for creating 3D speech visemes, one module for facial expression and modul for synchronization between phonemes and visemes and lastly one module to generate speech triphones. We are testing the correctness of generated visemes on Slovak speech domains. The paper descriebes our developed tool. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.