Online Face Avatar Motion Control based on Face Tracking

In this paper, a novel system for avatar motion controlling by tracking face is presented. The system is composed of three main parts: firstly, LCS (Local Cluster Searching) method based face feature detection algorithm, secondly, HMM based feature points recognition algorithm, and finally, avatar controlling and animation generation algorithm. In LCS method, face region can be divided into many small piece regions in horizontal and vertical direction. Then the method will judge each cross point that if it is an object point, edge point or the background point. The HMM method will distinguish the mouth, eyes, nose etc. from these feature points. Based on the detected facial feature points, the 3D avatar is controlled by two ways: avatar orientation and animation, the avatar orientation controlling information can be acquired by analyzing facial geometric information; avatar animation can be generated from the face feature points smoothly. And finally for evaluating performance of the developed system, we implement the system on Window XP OS, the results show that the system can have an excellent performance.