eFASE: expressive facial animation synthesis and editing with phoneme-isomap controls

  • Authors:
  • Zhigang Deng;Ulrich Neumann

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Houston;University of Southern California

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel data-driven system for expressive facial animation synthesis and editing. Given novel phoneme-aligned speech input and its emotion modifiers (specifications), this system automatically generates expressive facial animation by concatenating captured motion data while animators establish constraints and goals. A constrained dynamic programming algorithm is used to search for best-matched captured motion nodes by minimizing a cost function. Users optionally specify "hard constraints" (motion-node constraints for expressing phoneme utterances) and "soft constraints" (emotion modifiers) to guide the search process. Users can also edit the processed facial motion node database by inserting and deleting motion nodes via a novel phoneme-Isomap interface. Novel facial animation synthesis experiments and objective trajectory comparisons between synthesized facial motion and captured motion demonstrate that this system is effective for producing realistic expressive facial animations.