An observation based muscle model for simulation of facial expressions

This study presents a novel facial muscle model for coding of facial expressions. We derive this model from unintrusive observation of human subjects in the progress of the surprise expression. We use a generic and single-layered face model which embeds major muscles of the human face. This model is customized onto the human subject's face on the first frame of the video. The last frame of the video is used to project a set of manually marked feature points to estimate the 3 dimensional displacements of vertices due to facial expression. Vertex displacements are used in a mass spring model to estimate the external forces, i.e. the muscle forces on the skin. We observed that the distribution of muscle forces resemble sigmoid or hyperbolic tangent functions. We chose hyperbolic tangent function as our base model and parameterized it using least squares. We compared the proposed muscle model with frequently used models in the literature.