Interactive 3D facial expression posing through 2D portrait manipulation

Sculpting various 3D facial expressions from a static 3D face model is a process with intensive manual tuning efforts. In this paper, we present an interactive 3D facial expression posing system through 2D portrait manipulation, where a manipulated 2D portrait serves a metaphor for automatically inferring its corresponding 3D facial expression with fine details. Users either rapidly assemble a face portrait through a pre-designed portrait component library or intuitively modify an initial portrait. During the editing procedure, when the users move one or a group of 2D control points on the portrait, other portrait control points are adjusted in order to automatically maintain the faceness of the edited portrait if the automated propagation function (switch) is optionally turned on. Finally, the 2D portrait is used as a query input to search for and reconstruct its corresponding 3D facial expression from a pre-recorded facial motion capture database. We showed that this system is effective for rapid 3D facial expression sculpting through a comparative user study.