Spontaneous Facial Expression Analysis and Synthesis for Interactive Facial Animation

This chapter describes a probabilistic framework for faithful reproduction of spontaneous facial expressions on a synthetic face model in a real time interactive application. The framework consists of a coupled Bayesian network (BN) to unify the facial expression analysis and synthesis into one coherent structure. At the analysis end, we cast the facial action coding system (FACS) into a dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) to capture relationships between facial expressions and the facial motions as well as their uncertainties and dynamics. The observations fed into the DBN facial expression model are measurements of facial action units (AUs) generated by an AU model. Also implemented by a DBN, the AU model captures the rigid head movements and nonrigid facial muscular movements of a spontaneous facial expression. At the synthesizer, a static BN reconstructs the Facial Animation Parameters (FAPs) and their intensity through the top-down inference according to the current state of facial expression and pose information output by the analysis end. The two BNs are connected statically through a data stream link. The novelty of using the coupled BN brings about several benefits. First, a facial expression is inferred through both spatial and temporal inference so that the perceptual quality of animation is less affected by the misdetection of facial features. Second, more realistic looking facial expressions can be reproduced by modeling the dynamics of human expressions in facial expression analysis. Third, very low bitrate (9 bytes per frame) in data transmission can be achieved. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-024-2.ch002