A Face Animation Parameter (FAP) is a component of the

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related ...

Face and Body Animation (FBA) International Standard (ISO/IE
14496-1

developed by the Moving Pictures Experts Group. It describes a standard for virtually representing humans and humanoids in a way that adequately achieves visual speech intelligibility as well as the mood and gesture of the speaker, and allows for very low bitrate compression and transmission of animation parameters. FAPs control ke
feature points
on a face model mesh that are used to produce animated visemes and

facial expressions Facial expression is the motion and positioning of the muscles beneath the skin of the face. These movements convey the emotional state of an individual to observers and are a form of nonverbal communication. They are a primary means of conveying ...

, as well as head and eye movement. These feature points are part of the Face Definition Parameters (FDPs) also defined in the MPEG-4 standard. FAPs represent 66 displacements and rotations of the feature points from the neutral face position, which is defined as: mouth closed, eyelids tangent to the iris, gaze and head orientation straight ahead, teeth touching, and tongue touching teeth. These FAPs were designed to be closely related to human facial muscle movements. In addition to animation, FAPs are used in automatic speech recognition, and

biometrics Biometrics are body measurements and calculations related to human characteristics and features. Biometric authentication (or realistic authentication) is used in computer science as a form of identification and access control. It is also used t ...

References

External links

The Moving Picture Experts Group Website
MPEG-4 Biometrics Computer animation Anatomical simulation {{animation-stub