Project Proposal (PDF) - Oxford Brookes University

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FP7-ICT-2011-9 STREP proposal 18/01/12 v1 [Dynact] 2.2.4 - SUP – Supélec The fourth partner of the consortium supporting this proposal is Supélec, short for "Ecole Supérieur d'Electricité", one of France's prestigious Grandes Ecoles. Organisation. Supélec has a special position among France's leading engineering institutes, the reference in the fields of electric energy and information sciences. Internationally, with 440 engineers graduating each year, Supélec is on a par with the best departments of electrical and computer engineering of the top American or European universities. Supélec is an important training center for Ph.D students in the field of information, energy and systems sciences, and it welcomes more than 250 Ph.D students into its research programs and laboratory facilities. Supélec was founded in Paris in 1894. Today the school is spread over a three-campus network, located in Gif-sur-Yvette on the outskirts of Paris, Rennes in Brittany and Metz in Lorraine. The school has 3 main missions: initial training of engineers, research and development, and professional training. Very often the presentation of research activities is stifled by a dilemma: how does one present at the same time a cross-disciplinary approach (ex. Systems Sciences) without betraying the specialists and their specific fields of activity? Nevertheless, Supélec's research is basically organized into seven major fields of study, all closely linked to Systems Sciences. Telecommunications is one of them: SCEE, based in Rennes, belongs to the latter. SCEE (Signal, Communication & Embedded Electronics)'s objectives are the study and design of future communication systems based on Software Radio and Cognitive Radio concepts. The team has edited a book [137] which summarizes its three main research topics; among those, “Face Analysis and Synthesis” belongs to the “smart sensors” field. This line of research has been established more than fifteen years ago, and has since involved a small team of three to four persons: a permanent researcher with two or three Ph.D. students and a PostDoc. Face analysis for video communication coding was the main task during the first ten years: the objective was to model the face and its motion in order to create a parameterize model. Those parameters, rather than the 2D frame content compressed in a classical manner, were then transmitted to drastically reduce the bit rate. Face features detection was another important task. Main tasks attributed and relevant experience. In this project Supélec will work on the scenario where an actor is in front of several RGB-Z cameras and plays a part in a scene. Supélec will be in charge of the 3D face modeling and tracking. As described in Section 2.3.1, the partner has proposed a multi-objective optimization framework for Active Appearance Models convergence from several cameras to track expressive faces. Supélec will build on the same framework and adapt such algorithms to the case of RGB-Z cameras, which we deem crucial to enhance the impact of the project (WPs 4 and 5). Their previous work on 3D face modeling will be used too in this project, in order to propose a real clone of the actor and deliver a realistic expressive clone. Profile of the people involved. Renaud Séguier has been Professor at Supélec for fifteen years. After his PhD, he has received the HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) degree in 2011 for his research activities in face analysis and synthesis. He has developed specific skills in spiking neurons analysis, with the purpose of detecting spatio-temporal signals, and has applied them to lip reading. He has developed a hybrid multi-objective genetic algorithm dedicated to face analysis in lip reading, and applied them to the optimization of several snakes to describe the mouth's contours. Later, he applied these techniques to pose estimation from several cameras. In the last eight years his work has mostly focused on the use of Active Appearance Models in face analysis. He has put forward several improvements to make these models more robust to illumination conditions, unknown expressions and identity. His students currently work on two French collaborative projects; in particular the group's research conducted during IMMEMO [133], in collaboration with ISIR (Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique), has allowed him to win the Challenge dedicated to facial expression analysis at the last Face and Gesture conference in Action Unit detection [132]. <strong>Proposal</strong> Part B: page [44] of [67]
FP7-ICT-2011-9 STREP proposal 18/01/12 v1 [Dynact] 2.2.5 - DYN – Dynamixyz The indutrial partner featured by our consortium is the French company Dynamixyz. Organisation. Founded in April 2010, Dynamixyz is a simplified joint stock company (SAS – Société par Action Simplifiée) with headquarters located in Rennes (France). The company is specialized in high quality 3D face analysis and synthesis, for which there is growing demand and increasing potential for applications. With regard to analysis, for instance, few solutions are yet available capable of performing subtle detection of facial features in real-time. And yet the needs in this field are growing, as can be seen in the increasing use of reality applications at points of sale – virtual trying-on of glasses and virtual make-up are some examples – and in the marketing field’s requirements for detecting individuals’ gender and/or age. Synthesis is significantly growing, due to the widespread diffusion of video games and novel interactive entertainment experiences. There are still currently very few solutions for producing truly realistic facial animations – in most cases developing such animation can be costly and, depending on the application, the solutions offered are not always reliable. While more and more virtual humans are appearing on our screens, the current content creation solutions are not sufficient to meet the increasing level of realism demanded. Statistical systems which can produce good quality, on-the-fly animations are needed. Dynamixyz employs a large research team (six Ph.D. holders specialized in the analysis/synthesis fields). The company aims to create high-tech products for professional users which can be easily integrated into any platform. Products. Dynamixyz proposes two tools to animate and retarget the expression of an actor on a 3D character. “Director” [130] is a high quality facial animation tool designed for video game industry professionals and animation film production studios. Director can be used either as a plug-in for authoring – Director in 3DSMax and Motion Builder – or as an integrated library within a 2D/3D engine, for real-time use – Director RT. Supported by Dynamixyz technology, Director is capable of creating perfect facial animations from which highly realistic expressions can be generated, and to offer sophisticated lip syncing. “ Performer” [131] is a marker-less facial performance capture solution which only requires a headset- mounted camera. The system can be used to animate 3D characters in films, video games or in any virtual environment for which realistic facial expressions are needed. Once the Performer head-set is in place on the actor's head, a high accuracy computer vision system tracks the slightest of skin movements. Based on deformations in the skin’s texture, the system calculates the parameters required to animate the desired virtual character. The head-set mounted camera transfers video streams via a specifically designed wireless connection, leaving the actor completely free to play his/her role and to execute the movements they want the character to perform. Performer generates high quality output for film and video game production and an intermediate level of quality for applications involving real-time tasks (events, etc). Main tasks attributed and relevant experience. The relevant experience of Dynamixyz is quite extensively summarized above in the product description of Director and Performer: the company can provide solutions to animate a 3D character and retarget the expression of an actor on a synthesised avatar. The work assigned to Dynamixyz for this project takes place in WP5: it consists on proposing a specific face rigging (skin and bones, blend-shapes, muscular models…) animatable from the Expressive Space. This manifold will be used by Dynamixyz for the retargeting. The realistic texture extracted in WP4 from the actor will be converted in a texture dedicated to synthesis. The partner will use specific rendering techniques coming from the video games industries (ambient occlusion, global illumination, subsurface scattering and soft shadows) to attain a realistic animated face. Profile of the people involved. Olivier Aubault is a Ph.D engineer and the CTO of Dynamixyz. He is specialized in rendering techniques, and will allocate time for research activities and management. He participated in a national French collaborative project (RNRT V2NET) on 3D rendering of complex objects and in the Mpeg-4 group on mesh coding and animation. During his ten years at Orange Labs (French Telecommunication Company) he participated in many development projects in various domains, from real time rendering to 3D character animation. <strong>Proposal</strong> Part B: page [45] of [67]
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