Research Of Virtual Tongue Movements And Mouth Expressions Animation

Virtual human design is the main research field in computer vision(CV) and Virtual Reality(VR). People's mouth and tongue make greet contribution to facial expressions and movements. In this thesis, we have obtained a realistic mouth and vivid tongue model. We also analyse how to describe or control the human facial movements and expressions.This dissertation focuses on four aspects as follows:1. A 3D muscle controlled tongue model is presented. Based on the theory of tongue anatomy and motoric characteristics, the muscle of this model consists of two part-intrinsic tongue muscles and extrinsic tongue muscles. The intrinsic tongue muscles,which are made up of four muscles, can control the shape of tongue itself through the constriction of muscles. The extrinsic tongue muscles consist a couple of genioglossus muscle, they can control the whole tongue's movements. In the end, the real tongue model can be obtained with the 3D mesh model and texture matching technique.2. A 3D muscle controlled mouth model is described. According to the mouth muscle anatomy,the muscles of the model also consist of two part-musles around the mouth and jugomaxillary muscle. The muscles around the mouth control the lip's shape and expressions, while the jugomaxillary muscle control the movements of mandible. They mothod can obtains the parameters of nine muscles by only twelve key points, and can control the mouth movements and expressions by the constriction of nine muscles.3. The movement of tounge in part of English monophthong or consonant is studied based on the tongue and mouthe model. According to the sound patterns of the vowel and the recordings of Electropalatography (EPG), the tongue shapes can be labeled into some kinds. The multi-curve spectrum can represent and animate the shapes and the positon of tongue during speech.4. The whole 3D human head model is presented. A method called multi-curve spectrum to represent and animate virtual head movements and facial expressions is described. This method describes a group of fourteen time-varying curves of normalized muscle contraction.The above-mentioned methods have been testified by sets of experiments. The experiment results show small data quantity, low computing complexity, low computing time, realistic tongue and mouth model and realistic tongue's movements and mouth's expressions. The applications of the model and the control mothod include virtual teach design, virtual disc jockey, virtual shopping assistants, robot simulation and so on.