Online
Expression Control
Real-time
animation and control of three-dimensional facial expressions using a single
video camera
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Project
description
Controlling and animating the facial
expression of a computer-generated 3D character is a difficult problem because
the face has many degrees of freedom while most available input devices have
few. In this paper, we show that a rich set of lifelike facial actions can be
created from a preprocessed motion capture database and that a user can control
these actions by acting out the desired motions in front of a video camera. We
develop a real-time facial tracking system to extract a small set of animation
control parameters from video. Because of the nature of video data, these
parameters may be noisy, low-resolution, and contain errors. The system uses
the knowledge embedded in motion capture data to translate these low-quality 2D
animation control signals into high-quality 3D facial expressions. To adapt the
synthesized motion to a new character model, we introduce an efficient
expression retargeting technique whose run-time computation is constant
independent of the complexity of the character model. We demonstrate the power
of this approach through two users who control and animate a wide range of 3D
facial expressions of different avatars.
Publications
- Vision-based
Control of 3D Facial Animation, ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics
Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA 2003)
Videos, slides and data
- Two users
control and animate two avatars (15.6 MB avi
clip, no audio)
- PowerPoint (10.4M)
Project members
Related projects
- Performance Animation from
Low-dimensional Control Signals, ACM Transactions on
Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2005)
- Interactive Control of
Avatars Animated with Human Motion Data, ACM Transactions on
Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2002)
Acknowledgement
Supported in part by the NSF under Grant
IIS-0205224 and IIS-0326322.