AnaConDaR: Anatomically-Constrained Data-Adaptive Facial Retargeting

Offline facial retargeting, i.e., transferring facial expressions from a source to a target character, is a common production task that still regularly leads to considerable algorithmic challenges. This task can be roughly dissected into the transfer of sequential facial animations and non-sequential blendshape personalization. Both problems are typically solved by data-driven methods that require an extensive corpus of costly target examples. Other than that, geometrically motivated approaches do not require intensive data collection but cannot account for character-specific deformations and are known to cause manifold visual artifacts.

We present AnaConDaR, a novel method for offline facial retargeting, as a hybrid of data-driven and geometry-driven methods that incorporates anatomical constraints through a physics-based simulation. As a result, our approach combines the advantages of both paradigms while balancing out the respective disadvantages. In contrast to other recent concepts, AnaConDaR achieves substantially individualized results even when only a handful of target examples are available. At the same time, we do not make the common assumption that for each target example a matching source expression must be known. Instead, AnaConDaR establishes correspondences between the source and the target character by a data-driven embedding of the target examples in the source domain. We evaluate our offline facial retargeting algorithm visually, quantitatively, and in two user studies.