An Active Model for Facial Feature Tracking

We present a system for finding and tracking a face and extract global and local animation parameters from a video sequence. The system uses an initial colour processing step for finding a rough estimate of the position, size, and inplane rotation of the face, followed by a refinement step drived by an active model. The latter step refines the pre­vious estimate, and also extracts local animation parame­ters. The system is able to track the face and some facial features in near real-time, and can compress the result to a bitstream compliant to MPEG-4 face and body animation.