A facial image synthesis system for human-machine interface

The authors introduce a `face´ interface which is a user-friendly human-machine interface with multi-media and can realize a face-to-face communication environment between the operator and the machine. In this system, a human face appears on the display of the machine and it can talk to the operator with a natural voice. This paper describes the face motion and expression synthesis schemes which can be applied to this `face´ interface. The authors express a human head with a 3D model. The surface model is built by texture mapping with a 2D real image. All the motions and expressions are synthesized and controlled automatically by the movement of some feature points on the model. This `face´ interface is one of the applications of the model based image coding and media conversion schemes