Fast facial motion cloning in MPEG-4

Facial motion cloning (FMC) is the technique employed to transfer the motion of a virtual face (namely, the source,) to a mesh representing another face (the target,), generally having a different geometry and topology. We present a novel FMC method relying on the combination of the radial basis functions (RBF) based scattered data interpolation with the encoding capabilities of the MPEG-4 facial and body animation (FBA) international standard. Starting from a manually picked set of correspondences, we find a scattered data interpolation function that precisely fit the source face mesh into the target one. Then, all the MPEG-4 FBA basic movements (encoded as morph targets) of the source face are deformed using the same function and the deformations are mapped to the corresponding vertices of the target mesh. By doing this, we obtain, in a straightforward and simple way, the animatable MPEG-4 compliant version of the target face in a short amount of time.