Resynthesizing Facial Animation through 3D Model-Based Tracking

Title: Resynthesizing Facial Animation through 3D Model-Based Tracking

Teams: Microsoft

Writers: Frederic Pighin Rick Szeliski David H. Salesin

Publication date: September 1999

Abstract

Given video footage of a person’s face, we present new techniques to automatically recover the face position and the facial expression from each frame in the video sequence. A 3D face model is fitted to each frame using a continuous optimization technique. Our model is based on a set of 3D face models that are linearly combined using 3D morphing. Our method has the advantages over previous techniques of fitting directly a realistic 3-dimensional face model and of recovering parameters that can be used directly in an animation system. We also explore many applications, including performance-driven animation (applying the recovered position and expression of the face to a synthetic character to produce an animation that mimics the input video), relighting the face, varying the camera position, and adding facial ornaments such as tattoos and scars.