Facial motion cloning with radial basis functions in MPEG-4 FBA

Facial Motion Cloning (FMC) is the technique employed to transfer the motion of a virtual face (namely the source) to a mesh representing another face (the target), generally having a different geometry and connectivity. In this paper, we describe a novel method based on the combination of the Radial Basis Functions (RBF) volume morphing with the encoding capabilities of the widely used MPEG-4 Facial and Body Animation (FBA) international standard. First, we find the morphing function G(P) that precisely fits the shape of the source into the shape of the target face. Then, all the MPEG-4 encoded movements of the source face are transformed using the same function G(P) and mapped to the corresponding vertices of the target mesh. By doing this, we obtain, in a straightforward and simple way, the whole set of the MPEG-4 encoded facial movements for the target face in a short time. This animatable version of the target face is able to perform generic face animation stored in a MPEG-4 FBA data stream.

[1]  Fadi Dornaika,et al.  Efficient active appearance model for real-time head and facial feature tracking , 2003, 2003 IEEE International SOI Conference. Proceedings (Cat. No.03CH37443).

[2]  Demetri Terzopoulos,et al.  Constructing Physics-Based Facial Models of Individuals , 1993 .

[3]  Jörn Ostermann,et al.  Very low bit rate coding of virtual human animation in MPEG-4 , 2000, 2000 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. ICME2000. Proceedings. Latest Advances in the Fast Changing World of Multimedia (Cat. No.00TH8532).

[4]  Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann,et al.  MPEG-4 compatible faces from orthogonal photos , 1999, Proceedings Computer Animation 1999.

[5]  Demetri Terzopoulos,et al.  Realistic modeling for facial animation , 1995, SIGGRAPH.

[6]  Marco Schaerf,et al.  Realistic Modeling of Animatable Faces in MPEG-4 , 2004 .

[7]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  Geometry-based Muscle Modeling for Facial Animation , 2001, Graphics Interface.

[8]  Matthew Turk,et al.  A Morphable Model For The Synthesis Of 3D Faces , 1999, SIGGRAPH.

[9]  Jörn Ostermann,et al.  Animation of synthetic faces in MPEG-4 , 1998, Proceedings Computer Animation '98 (Cat. No.98EX169).

[10]  Tomaso A. Poggio,et al.  Reanimating Faces in Images and Video , 2003, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[11]  Igor S. Pandzic,et al.  Facial animation framework for the web and mobile platforms , 2002, Web3D '02.

[12]  Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann,et al.  Automatic 3D cloning and real-time animation of a human face , 1997, Proceedings. Computer Animation '97 (Cat. No.97TB100120).

[13]  Marco Fratarcangeli.  Physically Based Synthesis of Animatable Face Models , 2005 .

[14]  Frederick I. Parke,et al.  Computer gernerated animation of faces , 1998 .

[15]  Frederick I. Parke,et al.  Computer generated animation of faces , 1972, ACM Annual Conference.

[16]  Algirdas Pakstas,et al.  MPEG-4 Facial Animation: The Standard,Implementation and Applications , 2002 .

[17]  Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann,et al.  Facial deformations for MPEG-4 , 1998, Proceedings Computer Animation '98 (Cat. No.98EX169).

[18]  Raghu Raghavan,et al.  Volume morphing methods for landmark-based 3D image deformation , 1996, Medical Imaging.

[19]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  Head shop: generating animated head models with anatomical structure , 2002, SCA '02.

[20]  Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann,et al.  MPEG-4 based animation with face feature tracking , 1999, Computer Animation and Simulation.

[21]  Jörgen Ahlberg.  Model-based coding : extraction, coding, and evaluation of face model parameters , 2002 .

[22]  Igor S. Pandzic,et al.  Facial motion cloning , 2003, Graph. Model..

[23]  Jun-yong Noh,et al.  Expression cloning , 2001, SIGGRAPH.

[24]  C. Micchelli.  Interpolation of scattered data: Distance matrices and conditionally positive definite functions , 1986 .

[25]  Keith Waters,et al.  A muscle model for animation three-dimensional facial expression , 1987, SIGGRAPH.