Realistic Face Animation Research Articles

Facial Modelling and Animation: An Overview of The State-of-The Art

Animating human face presents interesting challenges because of its familiarity as the face is the part utilized to recognize individuals. This paper reviewed the approaches used in facial modeling and animation and described their strengths and weaknesses. Realistic face animation of computer graphic models of human faces can be hard to achieve as a result of the many details that should be approximated in producing realistic facial expressions. Many methods have been researched to create more and more accurate animations that can efficiently represent human faces. We described the techniques that have been utilized to produce realistic facial animation. In this survey, we roughly categorized the facial modeling and animation approach into the following classes: blendshape or shape interpolation, parameterizations, facial action coding system-based approaches, moving pictures experts group-4 facial animation, physics-based muscle modeling, performance driven facial animation, visual speech animation.

Visual speech, a trajectory in viseme space

AbstractEfficient, realistic face animation is still a challenge. A system is proposed that yields realistic animations for speech. It starts from real 3D face dynamics, observed at frame rate for thousands of points on the faces of speaking actors. When asked to animate a face it replicates the visemes that it has learned, and adds the necessary coarticulation effects. The speech animation could be based on as few as 16 modes, extracted through independent component analysis from the observed face dynamics. Rather than animating via verbatim copying the deformation fields that come with the different visemes are adapted to the shape of the given face. By localizing the face to be animated in a face space, where also the locations of the example faces are known, visemes are adapted automatically according to the relative distance with respect to these examples. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol 13: 74–84, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ima.10044

Realistic face animation for speech

AbstractRealistic face animation is especially hard as we are all experts in the perception and interpretation of face dynamics. One approach is to simulate facial anatomy. Alternatively, animation can be based on first observing the visible 3D dynamics, extracting the basic modes, and putting these together according to the required performance. This is the strategy followed by the paper, which focuses on speech. The approach follows a kind of bootstrap procedure. First, 3D shape statistics are learned from a talking face with a relatively small number of markers. A 3D reconstruction is produced at temporal intervals of 1/25 seconds. A topological mask of the lower half of the face is fitted to the motion. Principal component analysis (PCA) of the mask shapes reduces the dimension of the mask shape space. The result is twofold. On the one hand, the face can be animated; in our case it can be made to speak new sentences. On the other hand, face dynamics can be tracked in 3D without markers for performance capture. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.