hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
Facial expression analogy provides computer animation
professionals with a tool to map expressions of an arbitrary
source face onto an arbitrary target face. In the recent past,
several algorithms have been presented in the literature that aim
at putting the expression analogy paradigm into practice. Some
of these methods exclusively handle expression mapping between
3D face models, while others enable the transfer of expressions
between images of faces only. None of them, however, represents
a more general framework that can be applied to either of
these two face representations. In this paper, we describe a
novel generic method for analogy-based facial animation that
employs the same efficient framework to transfer facial
expressions between arbitrary 3D face models, as well as between
images of performer’s faces. We propose a novel geometry encoding
for triangle meshes, vertex-tent-coordinates, that enables us to
formulate expression transfer in the 2D and the 3D case as a
solution to a simple system of linear equations. Our experiments
show that our method outperforms many previous analogy-based
animation approaches in terms of achieved animation quality,
computation time and generality.