FACIAL ANIMATION TELECOMMUNICATION SYSTEM AND METHOD


Technical Field

          The invention relates to a telecommunication, and in
particular, to telecommunication including a representation of
animated facial expressions.

Background Of The Invention

          Realtime, high quality telecommunications providing
synchronized audio and video have generally been limited to
specialized network environments which afford users the needed
bandwidth to transmit the rate signals required needed to support
such a service.  Efforts to provide a more affordable, and
generally available audio/visual telecommunication service have
focused on reducing the sampling rate and/or the resolution of
video portion of the signal to economize on bandwidth, or upon
novel data compression schemes which allow more video information
to be transmitted at a given bandwidth.  This has resulted in the
availability of videophones that transmit and receive audio and
reasonably good video images in realtime over standard telephone
lines.  One such videophone is the VideoPhone 2500 available from
AT&T.
          A limitation of both videophone and specialized network
audio/video systems is the requirement for each site
participating in an audio/visual call to include a video camera
to capture visual information, and video processor to encode
and/or compress the visual information for transmission.  Both of
these requirements tend to add to equipment costs and complexity.
          Another limitation common to both videophone and
specialized network audio/video systems is the need for proper
audio and video equipment to be located at both the sending and
receiving ends of a call.  For example, in a two-party call, if
one party has a videophone, and the other a standard telephone,
then obviously the party with the videophone will not be able to
benefit from having the device.  The communication will be
limited to audio.  In general, this would present an
inconvenience to the party with the videophone.  However, in the
case where that party is hearing-impaired, and needs to rely upon
visual information to discern the meaning of spoken words, the
lack of a synchronized visual representation of the other party's
facial expression would effectively prohibit or severely impede
communication.

Summary Of The Invention

          The aforementioned problems are solved, in accordance
with the principles of the invention, by providing a
telecommunication device that displays an animated visual
representation of human facial expressions in response to a
received audio signal representing speech.  The animated
representation is produced by decoding the received audio signal
into basic phonic components, retrieving a still image of a
facial expression associated with each phonic component from a
memory with the telecommunication device, and displaying each
retrieved still image for a period equal to the duration of each
particular phonic component within the received audio signal so
that an animated sequence which appears to be synchronized with
the audio signal is produced.  Since the only images displayed by
the telecommunication device are still images from internal
memory, any called party may have the benefit of a visual
representation of the words being spoken by a calling party
without receiving any video information.  Obviously this
eliminates the need for any party to such a call to utilize a
camera.