MODEL-BASED 3-D FACE ANIMATION SYSTEM (LIP-SYNCHRONIZED) DESIGN FROM A VIDEO SOURCE

This thesis proposes a model-based 3-D talking head animation system and then constructs a simple 3-D face model and its animation by using Virtual Reality Model­ ing Language (VRML) 2.0 in conjunction with a VRML's Application Programming Interface (API), JAVA. The system extracts facial feature information from a digital video source. The face detection and facial feature extraction are prerequisite stages to track the key facial features throughout the video sequence. Face detection is done by using relevant facial information contained in the normalized YCbCr color space. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) approach is applied to the localized facial images to identify major facial components of a face. Then, an image processing approach is deployed to extract and track the key facial features precisely. Streams of the extracted and determined facial feature parameters are transferred to the ani­ mation control points of the designed VRML 3-D facial model. Since the face model is defined in the 3-D space while a given video source is a 2-D presentation, some heuristic rules are embedded to estimate the coordinates of unmeasurable points for