Parameter Estimation from Video

The Matlab script ExtractParamsGUI.m provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for manually extracting facial motion parameters from video clips. Although this can be quite labour intensive, it works well for short clips containing examples of species typical action units (see Parr et al. 2010 'MacFACS').

The GUI allows the user to select a video clip and scroll through it frame by frame. On each frame, facial motion parameter values can be estimated either in the image domain by dragging and dropping markers on visual features (e.g. mouth opening), or by entering normalized values on a timeline (e.g. head elevation).

Parameters are written to a .csv spreadsheet file, which can subsequently be read into Blender via the Python script ReadCSVdata.py and applied as key frames to animate the avatar.