A morphable model for the synthesis of 3D faces

Understanding others' actions and goals by mirror and mentalizing systems: a meta-analysis.

Humans, being highly social creatures, rely heavily on the ability to perceive what others are doing and to infer from gestures and expressions what others may be intending to do. These perceptual skills are easily mastered by most, but not all, people, in large part because human action readily communicates intentions and feelings. In recent years, remarkable advances have been made in our understanding of the visual, motoric, and affective influences on perception of human action, as well as in the elucidation of the neural concomitants of perception of human action. This article reviews those advances and, where possible, draws links among those findings.

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Perception of Human Motion

Human age, as an important personal trait, can be directly inferred by distinct patterns emerging from the facial appearance. Derived from rapid advances in computer graphics and machine vision, computer-based age synthesis and estimation via faces have become particularly prevalent topics recently because of their explosively emerging real-world applications, such as forensic art, electronic customer relationship management, security control and surveillance monitoring, biometrics, entertainment, and cosmetology. Age synthesis is defined to rerender a face image aesthetically with natural aging and rejuvenating effects on the individual face. Age estimation is defined to label a face image automatically with the exact age (year) or the age group (year range) of the individual face. Because of their particularity and complexity, both problems are attractive yet challenging to computer-based application system designers. Large efforts from both academia and industry have been devoted in the last a few decades. In this paper, we survey the complete state-of-the-art techniques in the face image-based age synthesis and estimation topics. Existing models, popular algorithms, system performances, technical difficulties, popular face aging databases, evaluation protocols, and promising future directions are also provided with systematic discussions.

/pdf/age-synthesis-and-estimation-via-faces-a-survey-4mmta1vo62.pdf

Age Synthesis and Estimation via Faces: A Survey

Peelen and Downing review recent evidence for body-selective neural mechanisms in the visual cortex and discuss how body-selective brain regions might relate to action perception and the 'mirror' system, perception of the self and the 'body schema', and understanding the emotions of others.

The neural basis of visual body perception.

People naturally move their heads when they speak, and our study shows that this rhythmic head motion conveys linguistic information. Three-dimensional head and face motion and the acoustics of a talker producing Japanese sentences were recorded and analyzed. The head movement correlated strongly with the pitch (fundamental frequency) and amplitude of the talker's voice. In a perception study, Japanese subjects viewed realistic talking-head animations based on these movement recordings in a speech-in-noise task. The animations allowed the head motion to be manipulated without changing other characteristics of the visual or acoustic speech. Subjects correctly identified more syllables when natural head motion was present in the animation than when it was eliminated or distorted. These results suggest that nonverbal gestures such as head movements play a more direct role in the perception of speech than previously known.

Visual Prosody and Speech Intelligibility Head Movement Improves Auditory Speech Perception

Linking facial animation, head motion and speech acoustics

Realism of rendered human skin can be strongly enhanced by taking into account skin wrinkles. However, modeling wrinkles is a difficult task, and considerable time and effort are necessary to achieve satisfactory results. This paper presents a simple method to easily model wrinkles on human skin, taking into account the properties of real wrinkles. Wrinkles are specified using intuitive parameters, and are generated over a triangle mesh representing a body part, such as a hand or a face. Wrinkled skin surfaces are rendered at an interactive frame rate, dynamically modulating wrinkle amplitude according to skin surface deformation while animating the body part. We demonstrate the ability of our method to model realistic wrinkle shapes by comparing them with real wrinkles.

/pdf/a-simple-method-for-modeling-wrinkles-on-human-skin-548ohw7mga.pdf

A simple method for modeling wrinkles on human skin

Neuropsychological research suggests that the neural system underlying visible speech on the basis of kinematics is distinct from the system underlying visible speech of static images of the face and identifying whole-body actions from kinematics alone. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to identify the neural systems underlying point-light visible speech, as well as perception of a walking/jumping point-light body, to determine if they are independent. Although both point-light stimuli produced overlapping activation in the right middle occipital gyrus encompassing area KO and the right inferior temporal gyrus, they also activated distinct areas. Perception of walking biological motion activated a medial occipital area along the lingual gyrus close to the cuneus border, and the ventromedial frontal cortex, neither of which was activated by visible speech biological motion. In contrast, perception of visible speech biological motion activated right V5 and a network of motor-related areas (Broca's area, PM, M1, and supplementary motor area (SMA)), none of which were activated by walking biological motion. Many of the areas activated by seeing visible speech biological motion are similar to those activated while speech-reading from an actual face, with the exception of M1 and medial SMA. The motor-related areas found to be active during point-light visible speech are consistent with recent work characterizing the human "mirror" system (Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, & Fogassi, 1996).

https://www.queensu.ca/psychology/sites/webpublish.queensu.ca.psycwww/files/files/Faculty/Kevin%20Munhall/Walking_talking1.pdf

Perceiving Biological Motion: Dissociating Visible Speech from Walking

A video coding apparatus ensuring a high coding efficiency even at a low bit rate includes a moving object analyzer which extracts a moving part from an input picture signal, analyzes its motion, and outputs a residual signal relative to a reconstruction image and motion parameters. The apparatus further includes a residual coding device for coding the residual signal, a reconstruction device for reconstructing a picture using the motion parameters, and a device that performs a variable length coding of the motion parameters and residual coded information.

Takaaki Kuratate

Papers

Visual Prosody and Speech Intelligibility Head Movement Improves Auditory Speech Perception

Linking facial animation, head motion and speech acoustics

A simple method for modeling wrinkles on human skin

Perceiving Biological Motion: Dissociating Visible Speech from Walking

Video encoder using global motion estimation and polygonal patch motion estimation