Faces alive: Reconstruction of animated 3D human faces

This paper presents a new method for reconstructing anatomy-based, animatable facial models with minimal manual intervention. The technique is based on deforming a multi-layered prototype model to the acquired surface data in an "outside-in" manner: deformation applied to the skin layer is propagated, with the final effect of deforming the underlying muscles. In the skin layer deformation, the generic skin mesh is represented as a dynamic deformable model which is subjected to internal force stemming from the elastic properties of the surface and external forces generated by input data points and features. A fully automated approach has been developed for deforming the muscle layer that includes three types of muscle models. Our method generates animatable models from incomplete input data and reconstructed facial models can be animated directly to synthesize various expressions.