Analysis and synthesis of facial expressions in knowledge-based coding of facial image sequences

A method is proposed which analyzes and synthesizes image sequences, and updates a three-dimensional facial model in knowledge-based image coding. Rules for synthesizing the output images are formulated to simulate the facial muscular actions. The input image analysis technique estimates the head motion and the facial actions directly and robustly without any correspondences. This technique also provides good reproduction of the original images because it is incorporated with the synthesis rules. The presented method for updating the facial model improves analysis accuracy and quality of the synthesized images.>