Realistic 3D facial animations with subtle texture changes

Illumination variance in texture is an important aspect of facial animation. Traditional facial animation techniques consider only facial feature geometric changes, but subtle texture changes in illumination are ignored. In this paper, by applying subtle illumination changes we present a novel technique to get realistic 3D facial animations. Firstly, we give the concept of PERI (partial expression ratio image) and the approach to get PERI. Then we parameterize the PERI according to the FAP (facial animation parameter) in the MPEG-4 based facial animation framework and develop the multi-view PERI technique, which makes 3D facial models have expressive expression at different viewpoints. Experimental results show that our technique can make facial expressions more expressive and convincing.