Preparing a facial mesh to be animated requires a laborious manual rigging process. The rig specifies how the input animation data deforms the surface and allows artists to manipulate a character. We present a method that automatically rigs a facial mesh based on Radial Basis Functions (RBF) and linear blend skinning approach. Our approach transfers the skinning parameters (feature points and t...

In this study, a system, that generates visual speech by synthesizing 3D face points, has been implemented. The synthesized face points drive MPEG-4 facial animation. To produce realistic and natural speech animation, a codebook based technique, which is trained with audio-visual data from a speaker, was employed. An audio-visual speech database was created using a 3D facial motion capture syst...

When done correctly, a digitally recorded facial performance is an accurate measurement of the performer’s motions. As such it reflects all the idiosyncrasies of the performer. However, often the digital character that needs to be animated is not a digital replica of the performer. In this case, the decision to use performance capture might be motivated by cost issues, the desire to use a favor...

We present a complete system for the automatic creation of talking head video sequences from text messages. Our system converts the text into MPEG-4 Facial Animation Parameters and synthetic voice. A user selected 3D character will perform lip movements synchronized to the speech data. The 3D models created from a single image vary from realistic people to cartoon characters. A voice selection ...

This paper introduces an interactive expression editing system that allows users to design facial expressions easily. Currently, popular example-based methods construct face models based on the examples of target face. The shortcoming of these methods is that they cannot create expressions for novel faces: target faces not previously recorded in the database. We propose a solution to overcome t...

Facial expression transfer has long been an important topic in computer graphics and vision, driven by applications in character animation, computer games, advertising and more recently, healthcare. However, how to make the synthesized facial expression realistic remains a challenge due to the complexity of human facial anatomy and our inherent sensitivity to facial expression. The current thes...

Synthesis of realistic facial animation for arbitrary speech is an important but difficult problem. The difficulties lie in the synchronization between lip motion and speech, articulation variation under different phonetic context, and expression variation in different speaking style. To solve these problems, we propose a visual speech synthesis system based on a fivestate, multi-stream HMM, wh...

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in facial animation research from both academia and the entertainment industry. Visual effects and video game companies both want to deliver new audience experiences – whether that is a hyper-realistic human character [Duncan 09] or a fantasy creature driven by a human performer [Duncan 10]. Having more efficient ways of delivering high qualit...

We present a system capable of producing video-realistic videos of a speaker given audio only. The audio input signal requires no phonetic labelling and is speaker independent. The system requires only a small training set of video to achieve convincing realistic facial synthesis. The system learns the natural mouth and face dynamics of a speaker to allow new facial poses, unseen in the trainin...

A facial gesture analysis procedure is presented for the control of animated faces. Facial images are partitioned into a set of local, independently actuated regions of appearance change termed co-articulation regions (CRs). Each CR is parameterized by the activation level of a set of face gestures that affect the region. The activation of a CR is analyzed using independent component analysis (...