Facial expressions are one of the important non-verbal ways used to understand human emotions during communication. Thus, acquiring and reproducing facial expressions is helpful in analyzing human emotional states. However, owing to complex and subtle facial muscle movements, facial expression modeling from images with face poses is difficult to achieve. To handle this issue, we present a method for acquiring facial expressions from a non-frontal single photograph using a 3D-aided approach. In addition, we propose a contour-fitting method that improves the modeling accuracy by automatically rearranging 3D contour landmarks corresponding to fixed 2D image landmarks. The acquired facial expression input can be parametrically manipulated to create various facial expressions through a blendshape or expression transfer based on the FACS (Facial Action Coding System). To achieve a realistic facial expression synthesis, we propose an exemplar-texture wrinkle synthesis method that extracts and synthesizes appropriate expression wrinkles according to the target expression. To do so, we constructed a wrinkle table of various facial expressions from 400 people. As one of the applications, we proved that the expression-pose synthesis method is suitable for expression-invariant face recognition through a quantitative evaluation, and showed the effectiveness based on a qualitative evaluation. We expect our system to be a benefit to various fields such as face recognition, HCI, and data augmentation for deep learning.
Keywords: facial expression recognition; facial expression synthesis; pose frontalization; single view face reconstruction.