3D Virtual Facial Animation for General Users

To realistically animate a 3D virtual face, we propose a real-time video-driven facial animation method. Firstly, we reconstruct the user’s 3D face model from a single frontal face image, and synthesize a set of facial images with different pose, illumination and expression based on this face model. The synthetic images are used to train a user-specific local texture model. Then, a video camera is used to record the facial performance of the user. Facial feature points are tracked using a constrained local model based method. Finally, facial tracking results are transformed to Blendshape coefficients based on 3D key shapes, and facial animation is generated by using Blendshape interpolation. Experiments show that our method is effective for realistic facial animation synthesis. Moreover, the method only requires a web camera and can be easily used by an ordinary user.