Shape and appearance models of talking faces for model-based tracking

We present a system that can recover and track the 3D speech movements of a speaker's face for each image of a monocular sequence. A speaker-specific face model is used for tracking: model parameters are extracted from each image by an analysis-by-synthesis loop. To handle both the individual specificities of the speaker's articulation and the complexity of the facial deformations during speech, speaker-specific models of the face 3D geometry and appearance are built from real data. The geometric model is linearly controlled by only six articulatory parameters. Appearance is seen either as a classical texture map or through local appearance of a relevant subset of 3D points. We compare several appearance models: they are either constant or depend linearly on the articulatory parameters. We evaluate these different appearance models with ground truth data.