Editing, Streaming and Playing of MPEG-4 Facial Animations
TechnologyImage CodingMPEG-4 Face Animation3D GraphicsFacial Animation ParametersStreamingTEKNIKVETENSKAP
Computer animated faces have found their way into a wide variety of areas. Starting from entertainment like computer games, through television and films to user interfaces using ?talking heads?. Animated faces are also becoming popular in web applications in form of human-like assistants or newsreaders. This thesis presents a few aspects of dealing with human face animations, namely: editing, playing and transmitting such animations. It describes a standard for handling human face animations, the MPEG-4 Face Animation, and shows the process of designing, implementing and evaluating applications compliant to this standard. First, it presents changes introduced to the existing components of the Visage|toolkit package for dealing with facial animations, offered by the company Visage Technologies AB. It also presents the process of designing and implementing of an application for editing facial animations compliant to the MPEG-4 Face Animation standard. Finally, it discusses several approaches to the problem of streaming facial animations over the Internet or the Local Area Network (LAN).