A Novel Transient Wrinkle Detection Algorithm and Its Application for Expression Synthesis

Because facial wrinkle is a representative feature of facial expression, automatic wrinkle detection has been an important and challenging topic for expression simulation, recognition, and animation. Recently, most works about wrinkle detection have focused on permanent wrinkles (e.g., age wrinkles), which are usually linear shapes, whereas the detection of transient wrinkles (e.g., expression wrinkles) has not been sufficiently studied because of their shape diversity and complexity. In this work, a novel algorithm for automatic detection of transient wrinkles with linear, fixed, and chaotic shapes is proposed, which largely consists of edge pair matching, active-appearance-model-based wrinkle structure location, and support-vector-machine-based wrinkle classification. The proposed wrinkle detector is applied for expression synthesis and an improved Poisson wrinkle mapping approach is proposed. Experimental results illustrate the competitiveness of the proposed wrinkle detector in detecting different transient wrinkles. Compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, the proposed approach yields complete and accurate wrinkle centers. The expression synthesized by the improved wrinkle mapping is also much more realistic.