Interactive Facial Expression Editing with Non-linear Blendshape Interpolation

Abstract

The ability to manipulate facial animations interactively is vital for enhancing the productivity and quality of character animation. In this paper, we present a novel interactive facial animation editing system that can express the naturalness of non-linear facial movements in real-time. The proposed system is based on a fully automatic algorithm that maintains all positional constraints while deforming the facial mesh as realistic as possible. Our method is based on direct manipulation with non-linear blendshape interpolation. We formulate the facial animation editing as a two-step quadratic minimization and solve it efficiently. From our results, the proposed method produces the desired and realistic facial animation better compared to existing mesh deformation methods, which are mainly based on linear combination and optimization.