Face Animation: A Case Study for Multimedia Modeling and Specification Languages

This chapter will discuss the multimedia modeling and specification methods, especially in the context of face animation. Personalized Face Animation is and/or can be a major User Interface component in modern multimedia systems. After reviewing the related works in this area, we present the ShowFace streaming structure. This structure is based on most widely accepted industry standards in multimedia presentation like MPEG-4 and SMIL, and extends them by providing a higher level Face Modeling Language (FML) for modeling and control purposes, and also by defining image transformations required for certain facial movements. ShowFace establishes a comprehensive framework for face animation consisting of components for parsing the input script, generating and splitting the audio and video “behaviors”, creating the required images and sounds, and eventually displaying or writing the data to files. This component-based design and scripted behavior make the framework suitable for many purposes including web-based applications.