This chapter presents our research on real-time speech-driven face animation. First, a visual representation, called Motion Unit (MU), for facial deformation is learned from a set of labeled face deformation data. A facial deformation can be approximated by a linear combination of MUs weighted by the corresponding MU parameters (MUPs), which are used as the visual features of facial deformation...

Blendshapes”, a simple linear model of facial expression, is the prevalent approach to realistic facial animation. It has driven animated characters in Hollywood films, and is a standard feature of commercial animation packages. The blendshape approach originated in industry, and became a subject of academic research relatively recently. This survey describes the published state of the art in t...

This article reports results of a modeling system that is part of a larger project which seeks to achieve perceptually realistic animations of 3D models driven by speech. This system generates individualized animatable 3D face models driven by “muscles” and compatible with MPEG-4. Our main contribution is in the use of an extensive facial database and statistical techniques to generate plausibl...

We present a new facial animation approach that produces a wide variety of realistic facial expressions with advantages over existing geometry deformation and morphing methods for performance-driven animation systems. These systems sense and reconstruct a real person's facial expressions from an image sequence. The novelty of our approach is to sense and animate both textures and geometry using...

.................................................................................................................................................... 3 1 Motivation ........................................................................................................................................ 4 1.1 Facial Expressions in Sign Language .........................

In this paper, an approach that animates facial expressions through speech analysis is presented. An individualized 3D head model is first generated by modifying a generic head model, where a set of MPEG-4 Facial Definition Parameters (FDPs) has been pre-defined. To animate realistic facial expressions of the 3D head model, key frames of facial expressions are calculated from motion-captured da...

.................................................................................................................................................... 3 1 Motivation ........................................................................................................................................ 4 1.1 Facial Expressions in Sign Language .........................

With the rapid development of facial animation and facial motion analysis, the necessity of motion capture techniques increases dramatically. However, existing motion capture devices are still very expensive and have specific limitations. In this dissertation, an accurate and inexpensive procedure for estimating 3D facial and lip motion trajectories from mirror-reflected multi-view video is pro...

Audio-driven facial animation is an interesting and evolving technique for human-computer interaction. Based on an incoming audio stream, a face image is animated with full lip synchronization. This requires a speech recognition system in the language in which audio is provided to get the time alignment for the phonetic sequence of the audio signal. However, building a speech recognition system...