LIPS2008: visual speech synthesis challenge

In this paper we present an overview of LIPS2008: Visual Speech Synthesis Challenge.The aim of this challenge is to bring together researchers in the field of visual speech synthesis to firstly evaluate their systems within a common framework, and secondly to identify the needs of the wider community in terms of evaluation.In doing so we hope to better understand the differences between the various approaches and to identify the strengths/weaknesses of the competing approaches.In this paper we firstly motivate the need for the challenge, before describing the capture and preparation of the training data, the evaluation framework, and conclude with an outline of possible directions for standardising the evaluation of talking heads.