AgeRegression: Rejuvenating 3D-Facial Scans
Katharina Legde, Susana Castillo, Douglas Cunninghan · Computer Science Research Notes · 2018
The majority of virtual agents have adult bodies.There are, however, a number of reasons for using younger avatars.For example, an adult interface agent usually leads users to expect adult-level communicational and social skills.As a result, users tend to be rather intolerant when the interface agent makes obvious mistakes (e.g., incorrect grammar) or uses inappropriate behavior (e.g., looking away from the interlocutor).Since computer social-skills are still under-developed, it seems reasonable to use a body model that reflects this: child avatars.Unfortunately, the use of database-driven techniques for creating a variable-aged animation system would require a very large number of scans of children at different ages, making such a system impractical for technical and ethical reasons.As an alternative, this paper develops and validates a method for synthetically and systematically altering the apparent age of a virtual character.The here proposed technique is able to create younger and older versions of a facial scan and guarantees that the resulting meshes can be animated.Starting with a three-dimensional, adult facial scan, we use a physiologically-inspired, trigonometric polynomial to age-regress the model to a desired age.Quantitative measurements show that the technique can reconstruct the correct anthropometric proportions of 2-10 year-old children.A perceptual experiment provides an initial mapping of the technique's parameters onto the perceived age and realism.