Facial motion cloning with radial basis functions in MPEG-4 FBA

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 connectivity. In this paper, we describe a novel method based on the combination of the Radial Basis Functions (RBF) volume morphing with the encoding capabilities of the widely used MPEG-4 Facial and Body Animation (FBA) international standard. First, we find the morphing function G(P) that precisely fits the shape of the source into the shape of the target face. Then, all the MPEG-4 encoded movements of the source face are transformed using the same function G(P) and mapped to the corresponding vertices of the target mesh. By doing this, we obtain, in a straightforward and simple way, the whole set of the MPEG-4 encoded facial movements for the target face in a short time. This animatable version of the target face is able to perform generic face animation stored in a MPEG-4 FBA data stream. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.