顔形状データベースを用いた写真からの三次元表情推定と顔アニメーションへの応用

This paper describes a method to bring 2D photographs of faces to life, addressing the problems of creating realistic 3D models from 2D data and making credible deformations of the models for use in animation. First, a realistic 3D model is created from photographs using a statistical approach based on analysis of faces in a large 3D face database. This method has the advantage of incorporating 3D structure information from similar faces found in the database into the resulting face. The database includes over 200 people with 9 different 3D face postures, analyzed by principal component analysis (PCA). A small set of feature points from the face and the profile silhouette line extracted from front and side view photographs are used to create the new 3D face from the PCA results by linear estimation. Any new neutral 3D face can be easily represented by fifty eigen vectors obtained by this PCA. Next, speech-related face expressions are created for this model where the deformation characteristics can be estimated from faces in the database that are close to the input face in the eigen vector space. The estimated facial expressions are quite natural. As we show here the same method can also be applied to the faces of statues or dolls, or other human-like representations.To create an animation, results of additional principal component analysis of the estimated faces are used.