3D Facial Animation for Mobile Devices

This article presents the implementation of a 3D facial animation system for mobile devices. Due to the large processing and memory requirements for this type of application, its use on mobile devices was not possible until recently. Currently, however, with the increasing development of powerful hardware and with the spread of cellular telephony, 3D applications for these devices have become even more promising. The system presented in this article was implemented based on a previous one designed for desktop platforms. Both systems are driven by two kinds of input. The first one is an audio file containing the speech to be presented, and the second is a timed phonetic transcription specifying the phonemes of the utterance and their associated time spans. With the input data, the system converts phonemes into phonetic context dependent visemes that handle perseveratory and anticipatory coarticulation effects. The visemes are then used to modify the 3D polygonal mesh of the fa ce keeping the synchronization with the audio. The initial evaluation of the systems indicates that, despite the limitations of mobile platform, the implementation of video telephony using 3D facial animation is viable in modern mobile devices