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

Highly automated method for facial expression synthesis

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The synthesis of realistic facial expressions has been an unexplored area for computer graphics scientists. Over the last three decades, several different construction methods have been formulated in order to obtain natural graphic results. Despite these advancements, though, current techniques still require costly resources, heavy user intervention and specific training and outcomes are still not completely realistic. This thesis, therefore, aims to achieve an automated synthesis that will produce realistic facial expressions at a low cost. This thesis, proposes a highly automated approach for achieving a realistic facial expression synthesis, which allows for enhanced performance in speed (3 minutes processing time maximum) and quality with a minimum of user intervention. It will also demonstrate a highly technical and automated method of facial feature detection, by allowing users to obtain their desired facial expression synthesis with minimal physical input. Moreover, it will describe a novel approach to the normalization of the illumination settings values between source and target images, thereby allowing the algorithm to work accurately, even in different lighting conditions. Finally, we will present the results obtained from the proposed techniques, together with our conclusions, at the end of the paper

A head model with anatomical structure for facial modelling and animation

In this dissertation, I describe a virtual head model with anatomical structure. The model is animated in a physical-based manner by use of muscle contractions that in turn cause skin deformations; the simulation is efficient enough to achieve real-time frame rates on current PC hardware. Construction of head models is eased in my approach by deriving new models from a prototype, employing a deformation method that reshapes the complete virtual head structure. Without additional modeling tasks, this results in an immediately animatable model. The general deformation method allows for several applications such as adaptation to individual scan data for creation of animated head models of real persons. The basis for the deformation method is a set of facial feature points, which leads to other interesting uses when this set is chosen according to an anthropometric standard set of facial landmarks: I present algorithms for simulation of human head growth and reconstruction of a face from a skull.In dieser Dissertation beschreibe ich ein nach der menschlichen Anatomie strukturiertes virtuelles Kopfmodell. Dieses Modell wird physikbasiert durch Muskelkontraktionen bewegt, die wiederum Hautdeformationen hervorrufen; die Simulation ist effizient genug, um Echtzeitanimation auf aktueller PC-Hardware zu ermöglichen. Die Konstruktion eines Kopfmodells wird in meinem Ansatz durch Ableitung von einem Prototypen erleichtert, wozu eine Deformationstechnik verwendet wird, die die gesamte Struktur des virtuellen Kopfes transformiert. Ein vollständig animierbares Modell entsteht so ohne weitere Modellierungsschritte. Die allgemeine Deformationsmethode gestattet eine Vielzahl von Anwendungen, wie beispielsweise die Anpassung an individuelle Scandaten für die Erzeugung von animierten Kopfmodellen realer Personen. Die Deformationstechnik basiert auf einer Menge von Markierungspunkten im Gesicht, was zu weiteren interessanten Einsatzgebieten führt, wenn diese mit Standard- Meßpunkten aus der Anthropometrie identifiziert werden: Ich stelle Algorithmen zur Simulation des menschlichen Kopfwachstums sowie der Rekonstruktion eines Gesichtes aus Schädeldaten vor

Realistic and expressive talking head : implementation and evaluation

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Bi & tri dimensional scene description and composition in the MPEG-4 standard

MPEG-4 is a new ISO/IEC standard being developed by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group). The standard is to be released in November 1998 and version 1 will be an International Standard in January 1999 The MPEG-4 standard addresses the new demands that arise in a world in which more and more audio-visual material is exchanged in digital form MPEG-4 addresses the coding of objects of various types. Not only traditional video and audio frames, but also natural video and audio objects as well as textures, text, 2- and 3-dimensional graphic primitives, and synthetic music and sound effects. Using MPEG-4 to reconstruct an audio-visual scene at a terminal, it is hence no longer sufficient to encode the raw audio-visual data and transmit it, as MPEG-2 does m order to synchronize video and audio. In MPEG-4, all objects are multiplexed together at the encoder and transported to the terminal Once de-multiplexed, these objects are composed at the terminal to construct and present to the end user a meaningful audio-visual scene. The placement of these elementary audio-visual objects in space and time is described in the scene description of a scene. While the action of putting these objects together in the same representation space is the composition of audio-visual objects. My research was concerned with the scene description and composition of the audio-visual objects that are defined in an audio-visual scene Scene descriptions are coded independently irom sticams related to primitive audio-visual objects. The set of parameters belonging to the scene description are differentiated from the parameters that are used to improve the coding efficiency of an object. While the independent coding of different objects may achieve a higher compression rate, it also brings the ability to manipulate content at the terminal. This allows the modification of the scene description parameters without having to decode the primitive audio-visual objects themselves. This approach allows the development of a syntax that describes the spatio-temporal relationships of audio-visual scene objects. The behaviours of objects and their response to user inputs can thus also be represented in the scene description, allowing richer audio-visual content to be delivered as an MPEG-4 stream

Facial expression recognition and tracking based on distributed locally linear embedding and expression motion energy

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN