Research On Facial Deformation Algorithm

The shape analysis and deformation of 3D models have been a researchfocus in computer graphics, and have wide applications in entertainment,human computer interaction, multimedia and communication. Theappearance of 3D scanners makes the acquisition of 3D model faster.However, the data of human face acquired through laser scanners are localfragments, rather than a model as a whole. It would require extra manualmodeling based on the fragments before being used into any practicalvirtual reality system. On the other hand, there are a huge amount ofavailable 3D human body models which have unsatisfactory visual looksbecause of the coarse mesh topologies.We present a method of deforming the facial part of the existing coarsehuman body models, into a more visually pleasing and believableappearance of the face, according to the accurate facial 3D models acquiredby laser scanners.Our method makes use of the deforming algorithm based on Thin PlateSpline radial basis function, with the landmarks selected from the scannedaccurate face fragment, reshaping the facial part of the human body model.Butterfly subdivision is then applied to the target, to achieve a smootherlook. More surface details of the face are encoded into a normal map, whichcould be rendered properly in any modem graphics system, to present amore realistic look of the face.The method combines the accurate looks of scanned facial fragments andexisting coarse body meshes together, thus it's expected to achieve thebalance between best visual quality and the cost of integrating scannedfacial data into practical virtual reality system...