This work presents an approach for facial motion tracking and facial expression cloning to create a realistic facial animation of a 3D avatar. The exact head pose estimation and facial expression tracking are critical issues that must be solved when developing a vision-based computer animation. The proposed approach consists of two phases: dynamic head pose estimation and facial expression cloning. The dynamic head pose estimation can robustly estimate a 3D head pose from input video images. Given an initial reference template of a face image and the corresponding 3D head pose, the full head motion is recovered by projecting a cylindrical head model onto the face image. It is possible to recover the head pose regardless of light variations and self-occlusion by updating the template dynamically. In the phase of synthesizing the facial expression, the variations of the major facial feature points of the face images are tracked by using optical flow and the variations are retargeted to the 3D face model. At the same time, we exploit the RBF (Radial Basis Function) to deform the local area of the face model around the major feature points. Consequently, facial expression synthesis is done by directly tracking the variations of the major feature points and indirectly estimating the variations of the regional feature points. From the experiments, we can prove that the proposed vision-based facial expression cloning method automatically estimates the 3D head pose and produces realistic 3D facial expressions in real time.
Biography
Junchul Chun is currently a professor in the department of computer science at Kyonggi University, Suwon South Korea. He received a B.S degree from Chung-Ang University, Seoul Korea majoring in computer science. He also received MS and Ph.D degrees from the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Connecticut, in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He was a visiting research scholar in PRIP (Pattern Recognition and Image Processing) at Michigan State University during 2001. J.C Chun ' s current research fields are 3D face modeling, vision-based animation, and human computer interaction.