A 3D-anthropometric-muscle-based active appearance model

This paper describes a novel method for modeling the shape and appearance of human faces in 3D using a constrained 3D active appearance model (AAM). The method uses a generic 3D wireframe model of the face, based on two sets of controls: the anatomically motivated muscle actuators to model facial expressions and statistically based anthropometrical controls to model different facial types (3D-anthropometric-muscle-based-model, 3D-AMBM). This allows explaining a facial image in terms of a controlled model parameter set, hence providing a natural and constrained basis for face segmentation and analysis. The generated face models are consequently simpler and less memory intensive compared to the classical appearance based models. Additionally, our method achieves accurate fitting results by constraining solutions to be valid instances of a face model.