From the Symbolic Analysis of Virtual Faces to a Smiles Machine

International audienceAbstract—In this paper, we present an application of symbolicdata processing for the design of virtual character’s smilingfacial expressions. A collected database of virtual character’ssmiles directly created by users has been explored using symbolicdata analysis methods. An unsupervised analysis has enabledus to identify the morphological and dynamic characteristics ofdifferent types of smiles as well as of combinations of smiles.Based on the symbolic data analysis, to generate different smilingfaces, we have developed procedures to automatically reconstitutesmiling virtual faces from a point in a multidimensional spacecorresponding to a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) plane