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Abstract:
Animated characters that move and gesticulate appropriately with spoken
text are useful in a wide range of applications. Unfortunately, they are
very difficult to generate, even more so when a unique, individual
movement style is required. We present a system that is capable of
producing full-body gesture animation for given input text in the style of
a particular performer. Our process starts with video of a performer whose
gesturing style we wish to animate. A tool-assisted annotation process is
first performed on the video, from which a statistical model of the
person.s particular gesturing style is built. Using this model and tagged
input text, our generation algorithm creates a gesture script appropriate
for the given text. As opposed to isolated singleton gestures, our gesture
script specifies a stream of continuous gestures coordinated with speech.
This script is passed to an animation system, which enhances the gesture
description with more detail and prepares a refined description of the
motion. An animation subengine can then generate either kinematic or
physically simulated motion based on this description. The system is
capable of creating animation that replicates a particular performance in
the video corpus, generating new animation for the spoken text that is
consistent with the given performer.s style and creating performances of a
given text sample in the style of different performers.
