Evaluation of the reproducibility of non-verbal facial animations

Facial functional impairments develop from a variety of causes. In order to quantify the impairments of animations, the reproducibility of facial animations was investigated. In this paper, non-verbal facial animations of maximal smile, check puff and lip purse were captured by a video stereo photogrammetry system; and anatomical facial landmarks were tracked automatically. The same facial animations of the same persons were captured twice in an interval of 15 minutes for comparison. The set of landmarks was spatially-temporally aligned and the magnitude, speed of reaching the animation peaks and the similarity of the dynamic movements between the first and second captures were calculated. The statistical analysis revealed that the maximal smile was more reproducible than the other two expressions. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.link_to_subscribed_fulltex