Cartoon Facial Animation Based On Video-driven Study

Video-driven cartoon animation means tracking face in video and using facial expressions information-driven cartoon face model to produce consistent animation effects.Video-driven facial animation is a difficult problem in computer graphics and computer vision all the time, and it has been researched from many ways in recent years. There are many extensive applications of facial animation to a lot of industrial fields, such as video conference, computer game, digital entertainment, and so on. In this paper, four aspects are mainly studied: facial freature location and face match, video-based facial tracking and 2D facial animation based on MPEG-4.This paper improved ASM method, and developed a tool for facial feature edit. Then a similarity matching algorithm based on Modified Hausdorff Distance was presented.In video-based facial tracking, using ASM to locate face, after analyzing the different texture feature of different feature points, we unite these points into three groups and present using different methods to track points in different groups without any special markers. First, for the set of points around the eyebrow, we use optical flow method to track and improve this method at the same time. We reference the first frame and the previous frame instead of only the previous frame originally to improve the tracking veracity. Second, for the set of points around the mouth, EBGM are utilized by analyzing various information about texture. This method is paid attention for extracting helpful features in frequency field by Gabor transform. But the speed is too slow. In this paper, prediction with optical flow and estimation of Jet are used to accelerate the tracking speed for satisfying the practical purpose. Third, for the set of points on the eyelids, image binarization method based on maximum entropy is used to track the points on the eyelids for the special edge texture of eyes. Experimental results demonstrate that our combined tracking method is effective.In 2D facial animation based on MPEG-4, we amend the FAP and FDP in MPEG-4 standard which aims to 3D face animation and make them suitable for 2D face animation. In this way, not only practical purpose can be satisfied, but also the speed of expression synthesizing can be accelerated.Based on all of above researches, we construct a video-driven cartoon face animation system. This system can achieve the following functions, including face location, face tracking and cartoon face animation based on FAP, et al. Experiments show that the result is recreational.