MPEG-4 based 2D facial animation for mobile devices

The enormous spread of mobile computing devices (e.g. PDA, cellular phone, palmtop, etc.) emphasizes scalable applications, since users like to run their favorite programs on the terminal they operate at that moment. Thereflore appliances are of interest, which can be adapted to the hardware realities without loosing a lot of their functionalities. A Good example for this is "Facial Animation", which offers an interesting way to achieve such "scalability". By employing MPEG-4, which provides an own profile for facial animation, a solution for low power terminals including mobile phones is demonstrated. From the generic 3D MPEG-4 face a specific 2D head model is derived, which consists primarily of a portrait image superposed by a suited warping mesh and adapted 2D animation rules. Thus the animation process of MPEG-4 need not be changed and standard compliant facial animation parameters can be used to displace the vertices of the mesh and warp the underlying image accordingly.