Emotional facial expression transfer based on temporal restricted Boltzmann machines

Emotional facial expression transfer involves sequence-to-sequence mappings from an neutral facial expression to another emotional facial expression, which is a well-known problem in computer graphics. In the graphics community, current considered methods are typically linear (e.g., methods based on blendshape mapping) and the dynamical aspects of the facial motion itself are not taken into account. This makes it difficult to retarget the facial articulations involved in speech. In this paper, we apply a temporal restricted Boltzmann machines based model to emotional facial expression transfer. The method can encode a complex nonlinear mapping from the motion of one neutral facial expression to another emotional facial expression which captures facial geometry and dynamics of both neutral state and emotional state.