Facial Expression Mimicking System

We propose a facial expression mimicking system that copies the facial expression of one person on the image of another. The system uses the active appearance model (AAM), a commonly used model in the field of facial expression processing. AAM compositionally comprises some parameters representing facial shape, brightness, and illumination environment. Therefore, in addition to the facial expression elements, the model parameters express other elements, such as individuality and direction of the face. In order to extract the facial expression elements from compositional parameters of AAM, we applied principal component analysis (PCA) to the AAM parameter values, collected with each change in facial expression. The obtained facial expression model is applied to the facial expression mimicking system and the experiment shows its effectiveness for mimicking.