Professor Yoshinori Hijikata, of the School of Business Administration, received the Best Paper Runner-up Award at the Asia Pacific Workshop on Mixed and Augmented Reality (APMAR2019), which was held at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology on March 28th and 29th.

　　The title of the paper was “Speech-Driven Facial Animation by LSTM-RNN for Communication Use.” In this research project, Prof. Hijikata and his colleagues are developing a system that automatically generates the facial expressions of three-dimensional CG characters from voice communication. Typically, in order to generate facial expressions for CG characters, systems would detect and use human facial images in real-time. However, this was not practical, since a camera is necessary as an input unit, errors are inevitable for facial area detection, and people are not always in environments where they can produce facial expressions. This research project, which uses a deep learning method called LSTM-RNN, successfully developed a system that could automatically generate facial expressions through voice communication alone.
 
■Award-Winning Article
“Speech-Driven Facial Animation by LSTM-RNN for Communication Use”
Authors: Ryosuke Nishimura, Nobuchika Sakata, Tomu Tominaga, Yoshinori Hijikata, Kensuke Harada, Kiyoshi Kiyokawa
*This is a joint research project being conducted by the Kwansei Gakuin University School of Business Administration, the Osaka University Graduate School of Engineering Science, and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology Graduate School of Science and Technology.