Realistic Modeling of Animatable Faces in MPEG-4
Abstract
The diffusion of MPEG-4 Facial and Body Animation (FBA) specification in products and applications underlines the importance to have realistic animations of synthetic faces based on the compact parameter set provided by the standard. In this paper we propose a method to build an anatomically based face model suitable to produce general facial animation previously encoded in a MPEG-4 FBA stream. Our effort focus in conjugating MPEG-4 facial animation with some well-known techniques to reproduce the face anatomy on general static 3D meshes. The anatomy of the face is modeled as a multiple layer 3D mesh deformed through muscles that are placed in appropriate positions guided by MPEG-4 facial definition parameters (FDP). Such a model is utilized to synthesize the main part of the MPEG-4 face animation parameters (FAP) through a proper muscle-to-FAP mapping. For each FAP, the corresponding deformed face, namely morph target (MT), is built contracting the muscles corresponding to the FAP. The set of MT is stored in a compact and portable format called Animatable Face Model (AFM) and it is used as an input for MPEG-4 FBA commercial players. These players uses the AFM to perform animation encoded in a MPEG-4 data stream