Digital clones and virtual celebrities: facial tracking, gesture recognition and animation for the movie industry

We describe a high performance facial tracking and animation solution, called the Digital Cloning System/sup TM/ specifically designed to meet the needs of the entertainment industry. Special and digital effects are now being used in most feature films thus representing an important new application domain for facial and body tracking technologies. Virtual Celebrity's system consists of: a real-time module responsible for pre-visualization of the tracked data on the face of an animated celebrity; and an off-line component that suitably meets the needs of high quality special effects and film production. We briefly review the state-of-the-art and present a comparative analysis of needs, methods, and existing solutions in film production vs. Internet and video telephony applications. Experimental results and demonstrations prove the effectiveness of our method.