A fully automatic framework for building 3D animated avatars
Hugo Boujut, Mejdi Ourir, Titus B. Zaharia · 2014
The face animation process still requires an important amount of manual human interaction involving highly qualified artists with strong knowledge in facial anatomy. In this paper, we introduce a framework for automatic construction of 3D animated avatars. The proposed approach allows for animating an inanimate facial 3D mesh. The adopted representation is based on the MPEG-4 standard. First, the Supervised Descent Method (SDM) is employed for detecting automatically the MPEG-4 feature points starting from 2D images consisting of projections of 3D avatars. The originality of the approach consists of the training procedure proposed. Thus, we specifically train a SDM detector for each part of the face, i.e. mouth, eyes, nose, chin, cheeks, etc. Skinning operations are performed by jointly using the MPEG-4 FAPs and the feature point based deformation method. The combination of these three methods allows for building animated avatar with a large variety of shapes, i.e. from realistic human faces to cartoons.