Efficient Unwrap Representation of Faces for Video Editing

Unwrap mosaic is a method for decomposing a video into a 2D texture and a dense mapping that enable the reconstruction of the video from the texture. This representation is useful in some frameworks because we can edit videos by simply retouching 2D textures. However, the complexity of conventional approaches is too high to be adopted in time-critical applications (it takes up to several hours). In this letter, we focus on face-related applications such as face editing and replacement, and propose a face unwrap approach for these applications. To be precise, we adopt the view-based active appearance model (AAM) trackers and estimate dense mappings from the AAM results. The AAM also provides pose information which is also exploited in building the texture map. Experimental results show that our method is very efficient compared with the conventional unwrap mosaic approach. Moreover, based on the proposed system, we develop face-related applications.