MPEG-4 based animation with face feature tracking

Abstract

Human interfaces for computer graphics systems are now evolving towards multi-modal approach. Information gathered using visual, audio and motion capture systems are now becoming increasingly important within user-controlled virtual environments. This paper discusses real-time interaction with virtual world through the visual analysis of human facial features from video. The underlying approach to recognize and analyze the facial movements of a real performance is described in detail. The output of the system is compatible with MPEG-4 standard and therefore enhances the ability to use the available data in any other MPEG-4 compatible application. The MPEG-4 standard mainly focuses on networking capabilities and it therefore offers interesting possibilities for teleconferencing, as the requirements for the network bandwidth are quite low. The real-time facial analysis system enables the user to control the facial animation. This is used primarily with real-time facial animation systems, where the synthetic actor reproduces the animator’s expressions.