Animating facial images with drawings

Abstract

The work presented here describes the power of 2D animation with texture mai^ping controlled by line drawings. Animation is specifically intended for facial animation and not restricted by the human face. We initially have a sequence of facial images which are taken from a video sequence of the same face and an image of another face to be animated. The aim is to animate the face image with the same expressions as those of the given video sequence. To realize the animation, a set of frames are taken from a video sequence. Key features of the first frame are I’otoscoped and the other frames are automatically rotoscoped using the first frame. Similarly, the corresponding features of the image which will be animated are rotoscoped. The key features of the first frame of the sequence and the image to be animated are mapped and using cross-synthesis procedure, other drawings for the given image are produced. Using these animated line drawings and the original image, the corresponding frame sequence is produced by image warping. The resulting sequence has the same expressions as those of the video sequence. This work encourages the reuse of animated motion by gathering facial motion sequences into a database. Furthermore, by using motion sequences of a human face, non-human characters can be animated realistically or complex characters can be animated by the help of motion sequences of simpler characters.