METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR GENERATING AN AVATAR ANIMATION TRANSFORM USING A NEUTRAL FACE IMAGE

摘要

The present invention is embodied in a method and system for generating an animation transform using a neutral face image. An avatar editor uses a front head image and a side head image of a neutral face model for generating an avatar. The avatar is generated by automatically finding head feature locations on the front and side head images using elastic bunch graph matching. Significant time savings may be accomplished by generating an animation transform relating an avatar mesh derived from the neutral face features to a generic avatar mesh. The animation transform for the neutral face features may be applied to the other facial expression avatar meshes to improve the quality of the resulting avatar. The neutral-face-based animation transform provides significant improvement to the facial expression head models without the significant editing time incurred by generating a particular animation transform for each particular facial expression (and/or pose) features.