Statistical Facial Expression Analysis for Realistic MPEG-4 Facial Animation
François-Xavier Fanard, Olivier Martin, Benoit M. M. Macq · 2006
This paper presents a statistical study of facial expressions. The results can be used as a basis to develop a high-level realistic automated framework for real-time facial expression synthesis compliant with MPEG-4 Facial Animation (FA) specifications [1][2]. To achieve this goal, the entire Cohn-Kanade facial expression database [3] has been manually labeled so as to provide accurate statistics on the positions and shapes of a set of facial features (eyes, eyebrows and mouth) for six different emotions. After exposing this labeling process and the MPEG-4 Facial Animation specifications, the paper explains how to relate the extracted statistics to the low-level FAPs in order to obtain a simplified and realistic facial synthesis using only high-level actions. The main contribution of this paper is thus twofold: it extends the results presented in [4] (by quantifying FAP’s variations under the six emotions considered) and shows how these new results can be used to create realistic facial animation.