Automatic modeling and animation of 3D face with very dense mesh from stereo image sequence

Generating realistic 3D human face models and facial animations has been a persistent challenge in computer graphics. An automatic system that constructs continuous 3D facial animation models equipped with left-and-right cameras is developed. The facial features are automatically located, registered and partitioned with very dense triangular mesh. Each planar mesh point is associated with a depth value and a motion vector. A 3D geometry can be constructed by combining the planar mesh points with corresponding depth values, while the association of mesh points with displacement map produces animated facial expression. A 2D facial image of any character can follow the same feature extraction, registration and partitioning paradigms to establish the mesh point correspondence with the generic sequence stored. By inheriting the depth values and displacement map, an animated facial sequence of different person with the same motion characteristics is generated.