Synthesis of Facial Caricatures Using Eigenspaces and Its Applications to Humanlike Animated Agents

This paper first summarizes our unique method to synthesize facial caricatures using eigenspaces. This method can handle shape features of each facial part and arrangement features of facial parts independently. Then, in order to provide a dynamic lifelike agent based on a synthesized facial caricature, a method to represent mouth shape changes corresponding to speech and a method to give facial expressions are proposed. Here, the fact that facial features are exaggerated in facial caricatures is considered to synthesize an appropriate animation of facial caricature automatically. Experimental results show the usefulness of the proposed methods.