Real-Time Facial Animation based upon a Bank of 3D Facial Expressions

The importance of faces in human interaction explains the desire for synthetic faces as a communication vehicle in computer graphics. Unfortunately, animating a face is a very complex process, partly because of our very familiarity with the human face. Moreover, depending upon the application, there exists a wide range of faces to animate, whether realistically or artistically. We present here an animation system that captures live facial expressions from a performance actor, and uses them to animate in real-time a synthetic character. Our approach is based upon a bank of 3D facial expressions of a synthetic model. Critical points on the face model are matched to live markers. A linear combination of the basic expressions obtained by minimizing Euclidean distance between corresponding points and markers is then used to construct the intermediate facial expression. Mapping the motion into a bank of expressions produces subtle motions more dependent on the characteristics of the model i...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: CA
• Authors: C. Kouadio, Pierre Poulin, P. Lachapelle
• Keywords: CA 1998, Computer Animation, Facial Expressions, Live Facial Expressions, Model