18. The computer program product of claim 17 , further comprising generating the statistical model, wherein generating the statistical model comprises: obtaining audiovisual data including a plurality of samples, including real sample images of the individual's facial features for the set of utterances; extracting the acoustic feature vectors and the visual feature vectors for each sample of the audiovisual data; and training the statistical model using the acoustic feature vectors and the visual feature vectors.
17. A computer program product comprising: a computer storage device comprising at least one of a memory device or storage device; computer program instructions stored on the computer storage device that, when processed by a computing device, instruct the computing device to perform a method for generating photo-realistic facial animation synchronized with speech, comprising: storing, in a computer storage device, 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; storing, in an image library, 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; receiving an input set of acoustic feature vectors for the speech with which the facial animation is to be synchronized; using a computer processor, applying the received input set of acoustic feature vectors to the statistical model, the statistical model thereby generating a visual feature vector sequence; selecting, using a computer processor, a sequence of real sample images of the individual's head and facial features from the image library, such that the selected sequence matches the visual feature vector sequence generated using the statistical model 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 using a computer processor, applying the selected sequence of real sample images to the three dimensional model of a head to provide the photo-realistic facial animation synchronized with the speech.