Realistic 3D mouth animation using a minimal number of parameters

Our work on real-time animation enhances the realism of computer-generated faces by improving mouth modeling and allowing protrusion: 3 points on the corner of the lips are detected and the mouth model is completely controlled by the horizontal height and vertical width (h, w) of the mouth. Our approach parametrically models lip motion and mouth protrusion using parameters (h, w) and a textured realistic 3D face model. The basic idea for our approach, given parameters (h, w), is to compute the opening angle at the corner of the mouth as well as the protrusion coefficients using a radial basis function neural network, and to obtain the lip shape using a piecewise spline interpolation. Once the accurate lip shape is computed, the motion is propagated to outer contours of the mouth area based on heuristics of mouth motion and assuming a symmetry of the face. The CG rendering and implementation of our mouth animation algorithm achieves interesting results in enhancing visual realism with minimal computational expense by more accurately modeling the lip shape.