Depth sensor-based facial and body animation control

Depth sensors have become one of the most popular means of generating human facial and posture information in the past decade. By coupling a depth camera and computer vision based recognition algorithms, these sensors can detect human facial and body features in real time. Such a breakthrough has fused many new research directions in animation creation and control, which also has opened up new challenges. In this chapter, we explain how depth sensors obtain human facial and body information. We then discuss on the main challenge on depth sensor-based systems, which is the inaccuracy of the obtained data, and explain how the problem is tackled. Finally, we point out the emerging applications in the field, in which human facial and body feature modeling and understanding is a key research problem.