Surface detail capturing for realistic facial animation

Abstract

In this paper, a facial animation system is proposed for capturing both geometrical information and illumination changes of surface details, called expression details, from video clips simultaneously, and the captured data can be widely applied to different 2D face images and 3D face models. While tracking the geometric data, we record the expression details by ratio images. For 2D facial animation synthesis, these ratio images are used to generate dynamic textures. Because a ratio image is obtained via dividing colors of an expressive face by those of a neutral face, pixels with ratio value smaller than one are where a wrinkle or crease appears. Therefore, the gradients of the ratio value at each pixel in ratio images are regarded as changes of a face surface, and original normals on the surface can be adjusted according to these gradients. Based on this idea, we can convert the ratio images into a sequence of normal maps and then apply them to animated 3D model rendering. With the expression detail mapping, the resulted facial animations are more life-like and more expressive.