Tracking Talking Faces With Shape and Appearance Models

This paper presents a system that can recover and track the 3D speech movements of a speaker's face for each image of a monocular sequence. To handle both the individual specificities of the speaker's articulation and the complexity of the facial deformations during speech, speaker-specific articulated models of the face geometry and appearance are first built from real data. These face models are used for tracking: articulatory parameters are extracted for each image by an analysis-by-synthesis loop. The geometric model is linearly controlled by only seven articulatory parameters. Appearance is seen either as a classical texture map or through local appearance of a relevant subset of 3D points. We compare several appearance models: they are either constant or depend linearly on the articulatory parameters. We compare tracking results using these different appearance models with ground truth data not only in terms of recovery errors of the 3D geometry but also in terms of intelligibility enhancement provided by the movement

Talking faces for MPEG-4 compliant scalable face-to-face telecommunication

We present here a system that captures, encodes and renders speaker-specific speech gestures in a MPEG-4 compliant framework. The process is eased by two original options: (a) the use of a specific video capture via a head-mounted camera, (b).the a priori construction of speaker-specific shape and appearance models. We will show that speaker-specific articulatory movements can be straightforward encoded into the normalized MPEG-4 Facial Animation Parameters. We will comment the perquisite to possible extensions of this work towards every day life face-to-face communications and multimodal virtual teleconferencing

Morphing Generic Organs To Speaker-Specific Anatomies

We present here a framework for developing a generic talking head capable of reproducing the anatomy and the facial deformations induced by speech movements with only a few parameters. Speech-related facial movements are controlled by six parameters. We characterize the skull and mandible variability by six and seven free parameters respectively. Speaker-specific skull, jaw and face data are normalized using generic meshes of these organs and a robust 3D-to-3D matching procedure. Further analysis of these normalized data is performed using a decomposition of the 3D variance based on iterative principal component analysis aimed at identifying and predicting kinematic consequences of anatomical settings

Morphing Generic Organs To Speaker-Specific Anatomies

We present here a framework for developing a generic talking head capable of reproducing the anatomy and the facial deformations induced by speech movements with only a few parameters. Speech-related facial movements are controlled by six parameters. We characterize the skull and mandible variability by six and seven free parameters respectively. Speaker-specific skull, jaw and face data are normalized using generic meshes of these organs and a robust 3D-to-3D matching procedure. Further analysis of these normalized data is performed using a decomposition of the 3D variance based on iterative principal component analysis aimed at identifying and predicting kinematic consequences of anatomical settings