3D Face tracking and gaze estimation using a monocular camera

Estimating a user’s gaze direction, one of the main novel user interaction technologies, will eventually be used for numerous applications where current methods are becoming less effective. In this paper, a new method is presented for estimating the gaze direction using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), which finds a linear relationship between two datasets defining the face pose and the corresponding facial appearance changes. Afterwards, iris tracking is performed by blob detection using a 4-connected component labeling algorithm. Finally, a gaze vector is calculated based on gathered eye properties. Results obtained from datasets and real-time input confirm the robustness of this metho

HeadOn: Real-time Reenactment of Human Portrait Videos

We propose HeadOn, the first real-time source-to-target reenactment approach for complete human portrait videos that enables transfer of torso and head motion, face expression, and eye gaze. Given a short RGB-D video of the target actor, we automatically construct a personalized geometry proxy that embeds a parametric head, eye, and kinematic torso model. A novel real-time reenactment algorithm employs this proxy to photo-realistically map the captured motion from the source actor to the target actor. On top of the coarse geometric proxy, we propose a video-based rendering technique that composites the modified target portrait video via view- and pose-dependent texturing, and creates photo-realistic imagery of the target actor under novel torso and head poses, facial expressions, and gaze directions. To this end, we propose a robust tracking of the face and torso of the source actor. We extensively evaluate our approach and show significant improvements in enabling much greater flexibility in creating realistic reenacted output videos.Comment: Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Dg49wv2c_g Presented at Siggraph'1

Improving Facial Analysis and Performance Driven Animation through Disentangling Identity and Expression

We present techniques for improving performance driven facial animation, emotion recognition, and facial key-point or landmark prediction using learned identity invariant representations. Established approaches to these problems can work well if sufficient examples and labels for a particular identity are available and factors of variation are highly controlled. However, labeled examples of facial expressions, emotions and key-points for new individuals are difficult and costly to obtain. In this paper we improve the ability of techniques to generalize to new and unseen individuals by explicitly modeling previously seen variations related to identity and expression. We use a weakly-supervised approach in which identity labels are used to learn the different factors of variation linked to identity separately from factors related to expression. We show how probabilistic modeling of these sources of variation allows one to learn identity-invariant representations for expressions which can then be used to identity-normalize various procedures for facial expression analysis and animation control. We also show how to extend the widely used techniques of active appearance models and constrained local models through replacing the underlying point distribution models which are typically constructed using principal component analysis with identity-expression factorized representations. We present a wide variety of experiments in which we consistently improve performance on emotion recognition, markerless performance-driven facial animation and facial key-point tracking.Comment: to appear in Image and Vision Computing Journal (IMAVIS

2D-to-3D facial expression transfer

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Automatically changing the expression and physical features of a face from an input image is a topic that has been traditionally tackled in a 2D domain. In this paper, we bring this problem to 3D and propose a framework that given an input RGB video of a human face under a neutral expression, initially computes his/her 3D shape and then performs a transfer to a new and potentially non-observed expression. For this purpose, we parameterize the rest shape --obtained from standard factorization approaches over the input video-- using a triangular mesh which is further clustered into larger macro-segments. The expression transfer problem is then posed as a direct mapping between this shape and a source shape, such as the blend shapes of an off-the-shelf 3D dataset of human facial expressions. The mapping is resolved to be geometrically consistent between 3D models by requiring points in specific regions to map on semantic equivalent regions. We validate the approach on several synthetic and real examples of input faces that largely differ from the source shapes, yielding very realistic expression transfers even in cases with topology changes, such as a synthetic video sequence of a single-eyed cyclops.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles

Audio-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, but achieving realistic, human-like performance is still unsolved. This is due to the lack of available 3D datasets, models, and standard evaluation metrics. To address this, we introduce a unique 4D face dataset with about 29 minutes of 4D scans captured at 60 fps and synchronized audio from 12 speakers. We then train a neural network on our dataset that factors identity from facial motion. The learned model, VOCA (Voice Operated Character Animation) takes any speech signal as input - even speech in languages other than English - and realistically animates a wide range of adult faces. Conditioning on subject labels during training allows the model to learn a variety of realistic speaking styles. VOCA also provides animator controls to alter speaking style, identity-dependent facial shape, and pose (i.e. head, jaw, and eyeball rotations) during animation. To our knowledge, VOCA is the only realistic 3D facial animation model that is readily applicable to unseen subjects without retargeting. This makes VOCA suitable for tasks like in-game video, virtual reality avatars, or any scenario in which the speaker, speech, or language is not known in advance. We make the dataset and model available for research purposes at http://voca.is.tue.mpg.de.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201

Automatic facial expression tracking for 4D range scans

This paper presents a fully automatic approach of spatio-temporal facial expression tracking for 4D range scans without any manual interventions (such as specifying landmarks). The approach consists of three steps: rigid registration, facial model reconstruction, and facial expression tracking. A Scaling Iterative Closest Points (SICP) algorithm is introduced to compute the optimal rigid registration between a template facial model and a range scan with consideration of the scale problem. A deformable model, physically based on thin shells, is proposed to faithfully reconstruct the facial surface and texture from that range data. And then the reconstructed facial model is used to track facial expressions presented in a sequence of range scans by the deformable model