Image Morphing and Warping: Application to Speech Simulation Using a Single Image

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In this paper, we propose a fully automatic real time one image face gesture simulation using image morphing. Given a single image of a subject, we create several facial expressions of the face by morphing the image based on prior information stored in a data bank. The process involves the automatic detection of the control points both on the target image and the source data. The source data is a string of frames containing the desired facial expressions. A face detection neural network and a lips contour detector using edges and the SNAKES algorithm are employed to detect the face position and features. Five control points and the lips contour, for both the source and target images, are then extracted based on the facial features. Triangulation method is then used to match and warp the source image to the target image using the control points. In this experiment, using one expressionless face portrait, we create an animation to make it appear like the subject is pronouncing the five Japanese vowels. The final results shows the effectiveness of our method.