Facial Expression Synthesis Using Manifold Learning and Belief Propagation

Given a person’s neutral face, we can predict his/her unseen expression by machine learning techniques for image processing. Different from the prior expression cloning or image analogy approaches, we try to hallucinate the person’s plausible facial expression with the help of a large face expression database. In the first step, regularization network based nonlinear manifold learning is used to obtain a smooth estimation for unseen facial expression, which is better than the reconstruction results of PCA. In the second step, Markov network is adopted to learn the low-level local facial feature’s relationship between the residual neutral and the expressional face image’s patches in the training set, then belief propagation is employed to infer the expressional residual face image for that person. By integrating the two approaches, we obtain the final results. The experimental results show that the hallucinated facial expression is not only expressive but also close to the ground truth.