Modelling facial action units using partial differential equations.

This thesis discusses a novel method for modelling facial action units. It presents facial action units model based on boundary value problems for accurate representation of human facial expression in three-dimensions. In particular, a solution to a fourth order elliptic Partial Differential Equation (PDE) subject to suitable boundary conditions is utilized, where the chosen boundary curves are based on muscles movement defined by Facial Action Coding System (FACS). This study involved three stages: modelling faces, manipulating faces and application to simple facial animation. In the first stage, PDE method is used in modelling and generating a smooth 3D face. The PDE formulation using small sets of parameters contributes to the efficiency of human face representation. In the manipulation stage, a generic PDE face of neutral expression is manipulated to a face with expression using PDE descriptors that uniquely represents an action unit. A combination of the PDE descriptor results in a generic PDE face having an expression, which successfully modelled four basic expressions: happy, sad, fear and disgust. An example of application is given using simple animation technique called blendshapes. This technique uses generic PDE face in animating basic expressions.Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia and Universiti Malaysia Terenggan

Virtual human modelling and animation for real-time sign language visualisation

>Magister Scientiae - MScThis thesis investigates the modelling and animation of virtual humans for real-time sign language visualisation. Sign languages are fully developed natural languages used by Deaf communities all over the world. These languages are communicated in a visual-gestural modality by the use of manual and non-manual gestures and are completely di erent from spoken languages. Manual gestures include the use of hand shapes, hand movements, hand locations and orientations of the palm in space. Non-manual gestures include the use of facial expressions, eye-gazes, head and upper body movements. Both manual and nonmanual gestures must be performed for sign languages to be correctly understood and interpreted. To e ectively visualise sign languages, a virtual human system must have models of adequate quality and be able to perform both manual and non-manual gesture animations in real-time. Our goal was to develop a methodology and establish an open framework by using various standards and open technologies to model and animate virtual humans of adequate quality to e ectively visualise sign languages. This open framework is to be used in a Machine Translation system that translates from a verbal language such as English to any sign language. Standards and technologies we employed include H-Anim, MakeHuman, Blender, Python and SignWriting. We found it necessary to adapt and extend H-Anim to e ectively visualise sign languages. The adaptations and extensions we made to H-Anim include imposing joint rotational limits, developing exible hands and the addition of facial bones based on the MPEG-4 Facial De nition Parameters facial feature points for facial animation. By using these standards and technologies, we found that we could circumvent a few di cult problems, such as: modelling high quality virtual humans; adapting and extending H-Anim; creating a sign language animation action vocabulary; blending between animations in an action vocabulary; sharing animation action data between our virtual humans; and e ectively visualising South African Sign Language.South Afric

Creative tools for producing realistic 3D facial expressions and animation

Creative exploration of realistic 3D facial animation is a popular but very challenging task due to the high level knowledge and skills required. This forms a barrier for creative individuals who have limited technical skills but wish to explore their creativity in this area. This paper proposes a new technique that facilitates users’ creative exploration by hiding the technical complexities of producing facial expressions and animation. The proposed technique draws on research from psychology, anatomy and employs Autodesk Maya as a use case by developing a creative tool, which extends Maya’s Blend Shape Editor. User testing revealed that novice users in the creative media, employing the proposed tool can produce rich and realistic facial expressions that portray new interesting emotions. It reduced production time by 25% when compared to Maya and by 40% when compared to 3DS Max equivalent tools

Facial Modelling and animation trends in the new millennium : a survey

M.Sc (Computer Science)Facial modelling and animation is considered one of the most challenging areas in the animation world. Since Parke and Waters’s (1996) comprehensive book, no major work encompassing the entire field of facial animation has been published. This thesis covers Parke and Waters’s work, while also providing a survey of the developments in the field since 1996. The thesis describes, analyses, and compares (where applicable) the existing techniques and practices used to produce the facial animation. Where applicable, the related techniques are grouped in the same chapter and described in a chronological fashion, outlining their differences, as well as their advantages and disadvantages. The thesis is concluded by exploratory work towards a talking head for Northern Sotho. Facial animation and lip synchronisation of a fragment of Northern Sotho is done by using software tools primarily designed for English.Computin

The use of mobile phones as service-delivery devices in sign language machine translation system

Masters of ScienceThis thesis investigates the use of mobile phones as service-delivery devices in a sign language machine translation system. Four sign language visualization methods were evaluated on mobile phones. Three of the methods were synthetic sign language visualization methods. Three factors were considered: the intelligibility of sign language, as rendered by the method; the power consumption; and the bandwidth usage associated with each method. The average intelligibility rate was 65%, with some methods achieving intelligibility rates of up to 92%. The average size was 162 KB and, on average, the power consumption increased to 180% of the idle state, across all methods. This research forms part of the Integration of Signed and Verbal Communication: South African Sign Language Recognition and Animation (SASL) project at the University of the Western Cape and serves as an integration platform for the group's research. In order to perform this research a machine translation system that uses mobile phones as service-delivery devices was developed as well as a 3D Avatar for mobile phones. It was concluded that mobile phones are suitable service-delivery platforms for sign language machine translation systems.South Afric

A new method for generic three dimensional human face modelling for emotional bio-robots

Existing 3D human face modelling methods are confronted with difficulties in applying flexible control over all facial features and generating a great number of different face models. The gap between the existing methods and the requirements of emotional bio-robots applications urges the creation of a generic 3D human face model. This thesis focuses on proposing and developing two new methods involved in the research of emotional bio-robots: face detection in complex background images based on skin colour model and establishment of a generic 3D human face model based on NURBS. The contributions of this thesis are: A new skin colour based face detection method has been proposed and developed. The new method consists of skin colour model for skin regions detection and geometric rules for distinguishing faces from detected regions. By comparing to other previous methods, the new method achieved better results of detection rate of 86.15% and detection speed of 0.4-1.2 seconds without any training datasets. A generic 3D human face modelling method is proposed and developed. This generic parametric face model has the abilities of flexible control over all facial features and generating various face models for different applications. It includes: The segmentation of a human face of 21 surface features. These surfaces have 34 boundary curves. This feature-based segmentation enables the independent manipulation of different geometrical regions of human face. The NURBS curve face model and NURBS surface face model. These two models are built up based on cubic NURBS reverse computation. The elements of the curve model and surface model can be manipulated to change the appearances of the models by their parameters which are obtained by NURBS reverse computation. A new 3D human face modelling method has been proposed and implemented based on bi-cubic NURBS through analysing the characteristic features and boundary conditions of NURBS techniques. This model can be manipulated through control points on the NURBS facial features to build any specific face models for any kind of appearances and to simulate dynamic facial expressions for various applications such as emotional bio-robots, aesthetic surgery, films and games, and crime investigation and prevention, etc