Animated face modeling and adaptation with triangular B-spline

This paper concentrates on creating individual faces for MPEG4 compliant animation with triangular B-spline. We reconstruct 3D face by adapting a generic face model. A semi-automatic method, which creates human face from Cyberware range and texture data, and deformation primitive, an auxiliary tool for face editing, are presented. In both tools triangular B-spline (tri-B-spline) is employed to represent faces as smooth surfaces. This representation makes our semiautomatic method more robust to range data errors and facilitates the optimization process. For the Cyberware data of an individual face, our method first modifies the generic model to initialize in a semiautomatic way. Then non-linear optimization is performed to decide shape information for this specific face. Texture mapping is trivial after face shape is decided. Our method needs a minimum user interaction. It is also robust for different initialization. Our deformation primitive, which is designed semantically, facilitates face-editing procedure greatly. The reconstructed 3D face can be animated immediately with MPEG4 Facial Animation Parameter (FAP) streams.