9. A computer system for generating photo-realistic facial animation synchronized with speech, comprising: a computer storage device storing a statistical model of audiovisual data over time, based on acoustic feature vectors from actual audio data and visual feature vectors of lips images extracted from real sample images of a head and facial features of an individual during a set of utterances by the individual; an image library storing real sample images of the individual's head and facial features during the set of utterances, the image library further storing for each of the stored real sample images the visual feature vectors obtained from the lips image extracted from the real sample image as used to generate the statistical model; a synthesis module having an input for receiving an input set of feature vectors for speech with which the facial animation is to be synchronized, and providing as an output a visual feature vector sequence corresponding to the input set of feature vectors according to the statistical model; an image selection module having an input for receiving the visual feature vector sequence from the output of the synthesis module, and accessing the image library using the received visual feature vector sequence to generate an output providing a sequence of real sample images of the individual's head and facial features from the image library having visual feature vectors that match the visual feature vectors in the visual feature vector sequence received from the synthesis module by comparing visual feature vectors in the visual feature vector sequence with visual feature vectors associated with the real sample images in the image library; and an animation module having an input for receiving a three dimensional model of a head and the sequence of real sample images from the image selection module, and an output providing the facial animation synchronized with the speech.
16. The computer system of claim 9 , wherein the image selection module accesses the image library using the visual feature vector sequence to identify a sequence of real sample images from the image library that matches the visual feature vector sequence based on both a target cost and a concatenation cost.