Submitted to Graphical Models journal, 18.09.2001. Abstract Facial Motion Cloning 1

We propose a method for automatically copying facial motion from one 3D face model to another, while preserving the compliance of the motion to the MPEG-4 FBA standard. Despite the enormous progress in the field of Facial Animation, producing a new animatable face from scratch is still a tremendous task for an artist. Although many methods exist to animate a face automatically based on procedural methods, these methods still need to be initialized by defining facial regions or similar, and they lack flexibility because the artist can only obtain the facial motion that a particular algorithm offers. Therefore a very common approach is interpolation between key facial expressions, usually called morph targets, containing either speech elements (visemes) or emotional expressions. Following the same approach, the MPEG-4 Facial Animation specification offers a method for interpolation of facial motion from key positions, called Facial Animation Tables. Our method automatically copies the motion of vertices, as well as geometry transforms, from source face to target face while maintaining the regional correspondences and the correct scale of motion. It requires the user only to identify a subset of the MPEG-4 Feature Points in the source and target faces. The scale of the movement is normalized with respect to MPEG-4 normalization units (FAPUs), meaning that the MPEG-4 FBA compliance of the copied motion is preserved. Our method is therefore suitable not only for cloning of free facial expressions, but also of MPEG-4 compatible facial motion, in particular the Facial Animation Tables. We believe that Facial Motion Cloning offers dramatic time saving to artists producing morph targets for facial animation o