Automated modelling of real human faces for 3D animation

This paper describes the automated creation of a textured face mask of a natural person suitable for real time animation. A 3D surface polygon face mask is used. A set of muscles is defined to animate the mask. The mask is adapted to a real person using 3D surface data from a calibrated stereo sensor. First, the facial features of the mask are aligned to the 3D data by scaling the mask. Next, a local shape adaptation moves the mask vertices along their surface normals to be coplanar with the measured 3D surface. The adapted mask is textured from one of the stereo images yielding a highly realistic impression. The predefined muscles are used to animate the textured mask