A Face Animation Parameter (FAP) is a component of the MPEG-4 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

viseme A viseme is any of several speech sounds that look the same, for example when lip reading (Fisher 1968). Visemes and phonemes do not share a one-to-one correspondence. Often several phonemes correspond to a single viseme, as several phonemes look ...

s and

facial expressions A facial expression is one or more motions or positions of the muscles beneath the skin of the face. According to one set of controversial theories, these movements convey the emotional state of an individual to observers. Facial expressions are ...

, 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 The facial muscles are a group of striated skeletal muscles supplied by the facial nerve (cranial nerve VII) that, among other things, control facial expression. These muscles are also called mimetic muscles. They are only found in mammals, alth ...

movements. In addition to animation, FAPs are used in

automatic speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ...

and

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

References

External links

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