A 2 0 0 5 8 th International Conference COMPUTER GRAPHICS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE PROCEEDINGS OF THE CONFERENCE

The paper is devoted to the problems of automatic computer facial animation. Based on the experience of Intel Facial Animation Library (IFAL) development, animation framework, methods, problems and perspectives are analyzed. IFAL is used as a part of “ synthetic video” pipeline, which contains tools for: personified 3D head model creation from video, automatic one-camera face tracking, offline head movements modeling, online 3D model deformation and rendering. This pipeline gives possibilities to use the tools for implementation of various applications like video conferencing and text-to-speech animation. IFAL was developed in accordance with MPEG-4 requirements, so the authors have got real experience and knowledge of both merits and demerits of MPEG-4 compliant animation; some of these ideas are considered. The paper gives short glance on 3D head model deformation methods and describes ones, implemented in IFAL. Animation quality and possible future ways for synthetic head appearance improvement are discussed.