Unconventional approaches for facial animation and tracking

In recent years, depth cameras have become commodity hardware already in many households. That trend allows for an action-driven facial animator system to become commonly available. In this paper, we layout the methods involved in driving high quality CG facial animations by capturing and matching human actions at real-time speeds. We explore two important sub-problems for this issue: (i) head motion tracking and (ii) animation creation for virtual characters. For head motion tracking, we present a 3D template matching framework, achieving real-time performance and yielding results more accurate than current state-of-the-art motion tracking methods. For animation creation, we provide a 3D animation retrieval system that allows artists to easily retrieve and reuse desired animations from an existing database of already rigged facial animations.