REAL-TIME SYNTHESIS OF A HUMAN-LIKE AGENT IN RESPONSE TO THE USERS MOVING IMAGE

This paper describes a parallel computing system and a software algori thm for real-time interaction between a human user and a synthesized, humanlike, moving image. The realistic humanlike agent on a monitor ca n recognize the palm position and finger motion (finger sign) of the u ser. She/he then tracks and gazes at the hand position to change her/h is facial expression in response to the finger sign in real time. This visual software agent (VSA) is expected to play an important role in building an advanced human interface. We regard this type of interacti ve agent as a visual software robot. To achieve real-time image recogn ition and image synthesis, we have developed a parallel visual compute r system - the transputer network with visual interface to transputers (TN-VIT). The image- synthesis speed of the TN-VIT is about 24 frames /s, including finger-sign recognition. Some samples of synthesized ima ges and experimental results are shown.