Real-time Avatar Animation from a Single Image.

A real time facial puppetry system is presented. Compared with existing systems, the proposed method requires no special hardware, runs in real time (23 frames-per-second), and requires only a single image of the avatar and user. The user's facial expression is captured through a real-time 3D non-rigid tracking system. Expression transfer is achieved by combining a generic expression model with synthetically generated examples that better capture person specific characteristics. Performance of the system is evaluated on avatars of real people as well as masks and cartoon characters.

Deformable Face Fitting with Soft Correspondence Constraints.

Despite significant progress in deformable model fitting over the last decade, the problem of efficient and accurate person-independent face fitting remains a challenging problem. In this work, a reformulation of the generative fitting objective is presented, where only soft correspondences between the model and the image are enforced. This has the dual effect of improving robustness to unseen faces as well as affording fitting time which scales linearly with the model's complexity. This approach is compared with three state-of-the-art fitting methods on the problem of person independent face fitting, where it is shown to closely approach the accuracy of the currently best performing method while affording significant computational savings.