Elastic body spline technique for feature point generation and face modeling

Due to the advent of MPEG-4 standard, facial animation has been receiving significant attention lately. A common approach for facial animation is to use the mesh model. The physics-based transformation, elastic body spline (EBS), has been proposed to deform the facial mesh model and generate realistic expression by assuming the whole facial image has the same elastic property. In this paper, we partition facial images into different regions and propose an iterative algorithm to find the elastic property of each facial region. By doing so, we can obtain the EBS for mesh vertices in the facial mesh model such that facial animation can be more realistically achieved.