Daniel Wood’s research while affiliated with University of Washington and other places

We have created a system for capturing both the three-dimensional geometry and color and shading information for human facial ex- pressions. We use this data to reconstruct photorealistic, 3D ani- mations of the captured expressions. The system uses a large set of sampling points on the face to accurately track the three dimen- sional deformations of the face. Simultaneously with the tracking of the geometric data, we capture multiple high resolution, regis- tered video images of the face. These images are used to create a texture map sequence for a three dimensional polygonal face model which can then be rendered on standard D graphics hardware. The resulting facial animation is surprisingly life-like and looks very much like the original live performance. Separating the capture of the geometry from the texture images eliminates much of the vari- ance in the image data due to motion, which increases compression ratios. Although the primary emphasis of our work is not compres- sion we have investigated the use of a novel method to compress the geometric data based on principal components analysis. The texture sequence is compressed using an MPEG4 video codec. An- imations reconstructed from 512x512 pixel textures look good at data rates as low as 240 Kbits per second.