engleski

MPEG-4 Facial Animation: The Standard, Implementation and Applications

In the recently released MPEG-4 International Standard, the Moving Pictures Expert Group extended its focus from traditional audio and video coding to a much broader multimedia context including images, text, graphics, 3D scenes, animation and synthetic audio. One of the more revolutionary parts of the new standard is the Face and Body Animation, or FBA: the specification for efficient coding of shape and animation of human faces and bodies. This specification is a result of collaboration of experts with different backgrounds ranging from image coding/compression to video analysis, computer graphics, as well as speech analysis and synthesis, all sharing a common interest in computer simulation of humans. The result is a specification that is suitable for a wide range of applications not only in telecommunications and multimedia, but also in fields like computer animation and human-computer interfaces. This is the first standard for animation of human faces and bodies, and it has already gained a wide acceptance within the research community. As practical applications emerge, this acceptance is spreading into the commercial areas as well. In this book we concentrate on the animation of faces. The authors are some of the leading practitioners in this field, and include most of the important contributors to the MPEG-4 Facial Animation (FA) specification. We put the MPEG-4 FA specification against the historical background of research on facial animation and model-based coding, and provide a brief history of the development of the standard itself. In part 2 we provide a comprehensive overview of the FA specification with the goal of helping the reader understand how the standard works, what is the thinking behind it, and how it is intended to be used. Part 3, forming the bulk of the book, covers the implementations of the standard on both the encoding and decoding side. We present several face animation techniques for MPEG-4 FA decoders, as well as architectures for building applications based on the standard. While the standard itself actually specifies only the decoder, for applications it is interesting to look at technologies for producing FA content, and we treat a wide range of such technologies including speech analysis/synthesis and video analysis. The last part of the book brings a collection of applications using the MPEG-4 FA specification. In an appendix, we propose a standard benchmark method, with publicly available data, for assessing the quality of MPEG-4 FA decoders. We hope that this book will be a valuable companion for practitioners implementing applications based on the MPEG-4 FA specification, or for those who simply wish to understand the standard and its implications.

MPEG-4 FBA; face animation; facial animation

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