METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR ALIGNING NATURAL AND SYNTHETIC VIDEO TO SPEECH SYNTHESIS

Facial animation in MPEG-4 can be driven by a text stream and a Facial Animation Parameters (FAP) stream. Text input is sent to a TTS converter that drives the mouth shapes of the face. FAPs are sent from an encoder to the face over the communication channel. Disclosed are codes bookmarks in the text string transmitted to the TTS converter. Bookmarks are placed between and inside words and carry an encoder time stamp. The encoder time stamp does not relate to real-world time. The FAP stream carries the same encoder time stamp found in the bookmark of the text. The system reads the bookmark and provides the encoder time stamp as well as a real-time time stamp to the facial animation system. The facial animation system associates the correct facial animation parameter with the real-time time stamp using the encoder time stamp of the bookmark as a reference.