Face and 2-D mesh animation in MPEG-4

This paper presents an overview of some of the synthetic visual objects supported by MPEG-4 version-1, namely animated faces and animated arbitrary 2D uniform and Delaunay meshes. We discuss both specification and compression of face animation and 2D-mesh animation in MPEG-4. Face animation allows to animate a proprietary face model or a face model downloaded to the decoder. We also address integration of the face animation tool with the text-to-speech interface (TTSI), so that face animation can be driven by text input.