This paper presents an online chatting system with automatic expression animation and animated avatar. The system is constructed upon an XML based language AAML (Affective Animation Markup Language), which describes hierarchically affective content for online communication. Once the user types a chatting sentence, the AAML produces a piece of personalized facial animation. The animation would be sent to the remote client right now to enrich the chatting process. Comparatively, our system is designed with its dedicated feature that its structure is hierarchical and open, so the users can extend the AAML, defining their own tags to realize personal affective expression. In addition, caricature generation according to an input facial photograph is embedded in the framework, so the animation is synthesized based on the caricature with entertainment effect. Successful application of the online chatting system shows that our system can enhance affective interaction by the customized facial animation and the animated avatar that is similar with the user. The function can also be widely applied in online or mobile environment such as multimedia message synthesis.
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