Emotional facial expression model building

Human face plays a crucial role in interpersonal communication. If we synthesize vivid expressional face in cyberspace, we could make the interaction between computer and human more natural and friendly. In this paper, we present a simple methodology for mimicking realistic face by manipulating emotional states. Compared with traditional methods of facial expression synthesis, our approach takes three advantages at the same time. They are (1) generating facial expressions under quantitative control of emotional states, (2) rendering shape and illumination changes on face simultaneously and (3) synthesizing expressional face for any new person by only utilizing a neutral face image. We have discussed the implementation method in the paper and demonstrated the effects of our approach by using a series of interesting experiments, such as predicting unseen expressions for an unfamiliar person, simulating one's facial expressions with someone else's style, extracting pure emotional expressions from the admixtures. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.