Eyes alive

ABSTRACT

For an animated human face model to appear natural it should produce eye movements consistent with human ocular behavior. During face-to-face conversational interactions, eyes exhibit conversational turn-taking and agent thought processes through gaze direction, saccades, and scan patterns. We have implemented an eye movement model based on empirical models of saccades and statistical models of eye-tracking data. Face animations using stationary eyes, eyes with random saccades only, and eyes with statistically derived saccades are compared, to evaluate whether they appear natural and effective while communicating.

REFERENCES

• 1: ARGYLE, M., AND COOK, M. 1976. Gaze and Mutual Gaze. Cambridge University Press, London.
• 2: ARGYLE, M., AND DEAN, J. 1965. Eye-contact, distance and affiliation. Sociometry, 28, 289-304.
• 3: BAHILL, A., ANDLER, D., AND STARK, L. 1975. Most naturally occuring human saccades have magnitudes of 15 deg or less. In Investigative Ophthalmol., 468-469.
• 4: BECKER, W. 1989. Metrics, chapter 2. In The Neurobiology of Saccadic Eye Movements, R H Wurtz and M E Goldberg (eds), 13-67.
• 5: BEELER, G. W. 1965. Stochastic processes in the human eye movement control system. PhD thesis, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA.
• 6: BIZZI, E. 1972. Central programming and peripheral feedback during eye-head coordination in monkeys. In Bibl. Ophthal. 82, 220-232.
• 7: Volker Blanz , Thomas Vetter, A morphable model for the synthesis of 3D faces, Proceedings of the 26th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.187-194, July 1999 [doi>10.1145/311535.311556]
• 8: Matthew Brand, Voice puppetry, Proceedings of the 26th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.21-28, July 1999 [doi>10.1145/311535.311537]
• 9: J Canny, A computational approach to edge detection, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, v.8 n.6, p.679-698, Nov. 1986 [doi>10.1109/TPAMI.1986.4767851]
• 10: Justine Cassell , Catherine Pelachaud , Norman Badler , Mark Steedman , Brett Achorn , Tripp Becket , Brett Douville , Scott Prevost , Matthew Stone, Animated conversation: rule-based generation of facial expression, gesture & spoken intonation for multiple conversational agents, Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.413-420, July 1994 [doi>10.1145/192161.192272]
• 11: CASSELL, J., TORRES, O., AND PREVOST, S. 1999. Turn taking vs. discourse structure: How best to model multimodal conversation. In In Machine Conversations, Y. Wilks (eds), 143-154.
• 12: Justine Cassell , Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson , Timothy Bickmore, BEAT: the Behavior Expression Animation Toolkit, Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.477-486, August 2001 [doi>10.1145/383259.383315]
• 13: Sonu Chopra-Khullar , Norman I. Badler, Where to look? Automating attending behaviors of virtual human characters, Proceedings of the third annual conference on Autonomous Agents, p.16-23, April 1999, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/301136.301152]
• 14: COLBURN, R., COHEN, M., AND DRUCKER, S. 2000. Avatar mediated conversational interfaces. In Microsoft Technical Report.
• 15: Douglas DeCarlo , Dimitris Metaxas , Matthew Stone, An anthropometric face model using variational techniques, Proceedings of the 25th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.67-74, July 1998 [doi>10.1145/280814.280823]
• 16: DUNCAN, S. 1974. Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversations. Oxford University Press, New York.
• 17: I. A. Essa , A. P. Pentland, Facial expression recognition using a dynamic model and motion energy, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Computer Vision, p.360, June 20-23, 1995
• 18: FAIGIN, G. 1990. The artist's complete guide to facial expression. Watson-Guptill Publications, New York.
• 19: Brian Guenter , Cindy Grimm , Daniel Wood , Henrique Malvar , Fredric Pighin, Making faces, Proceedings of the 25th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.55-66, July 1998 [doi>10.1145/280814.280822]
• 20: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG11 N3055. Text for CD 14496-1 Systems MPEG-4 Manual. 1999.
• 21: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG11 N3056. Text for CD 14496-2 Systems MPEG-4 Manual. 1999.
• 22: KALRA, P., MANGILl, A., MAGNENAT-THALMANN, N., AND THALMANN, D. 1992. Simulation of muscle actions using rational free form deformations. In Proceedings Eurographics '92 Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 2, No. 3, 59-69.
• 23: KENDON, A. 1967. Some functions of gaze direction in social interaction. Acta Psychologica 32, 1-25.
• 24: Yuencheng Lee , Demetri Terzopoulos , Keith Walters, Realistic modeling for facial animation, Proceedings of the 22nd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.55-62, September 1995 [doi>10.1145/218380.218407]
• 25: LEIGH, R., AND ZEE, D. 1991. The Neurology of Eye Movements, 2 ed. FA Davis.
• 26: Frederic Ira Parke, A parametric model for human faces., 1974
• 27: PELACHAUD, C., BADLER, N., AND STEEDMAN, M. 1996. Generating facial expressions for speech. Cognitive Science 20, 1, 1-46.
• 28: PETAJAN, E. 1999. Very low bitrate face animation coding in MPEG-4. In Encyclopedia of Telecommunications, Volume 17, 209-231.
• 29: Frédéric Pighin , Jamie Hecker , Dani Lischinski , Richard Szeliski , David H. Salesin, Synthesizing realistic facial expressions from photographs, Proceedings of the 25th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.75-84, July 1998 [doi>10.1145/280814.280825]
• 30: Stephen M. Platt , Norman I. Badler, Animating facial expressions, Proceedings of the 8th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.245-252, August 03-07, 1981, Dallas, Texas, United States
• 31: VERTEGAAL, R., DER VEER, G. V., AND VONS, H. 2000. Effects of gaze on multiparty mediated communication. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2000, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Montreal,Canada: Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society, 95-102.
• 32: Roel Vertegaal , Robert Slagter , Gerrit van der Veer , Anton Nijholt, Why conversational agents should catch the eye, CHI '00 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 01-06, 2000, The Hague, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/633292.633442]
• 33: Roel Vertegaal , Robert Slagter , Gerrit van der Veer , Anton Nijholt, Eye gaze patterns in conversations: there is more to conversational agents than meets the eyes, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.301-308, March 2001, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/365024.365119]
• 34: WARABI, T. 1977. The reaction time of eye-head coordination in man. In Neurosci. Lett. 6, 47-51.
• 35: Keith Waters, A muscle model for animation three-dimensional facial expression, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.21 n.4, p.17-24, July 1987

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism
          Subjects: Animation

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
HCI (human-computer interface), eye movement synthesis, facial animation, saccades, statistical modeling