Real-time tracking and imitation of facial expression
Xiang Sheng Cao, Baining Guo · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2002
We present a system for tracking facial expression and head pose with one camera and no special markers, and generating a face animation to imitate these expressions simultaneously. The tracking is based on Gabor wavelet coefficients (jets) of the facial feature points, a saccadic searching strategy, and a model-based adjustment. Using Principal Components Analysis (PCA), we established an expression model and use it to drive the imitation animation. The system runs in real-time and the tracking shows robustness against illumination/background variation, accumulative error and partial occlusion. The imitation animation captures both the expression and the head pose without 3D information.