An algorithm is presented for estimating the direction and strength of point light with the strength of ambient illumination. Existing approaches evaluate these illumination parameters directly in the high dimensional image space, while we estimate the parameters in two steps: first by projecting the image to an orthogonal linear subspace based on spherical harmonic basis functions and then by calculating the parameters in the low dimensional subspace. The test results using the CMU PIE database and Yale Database B show the stability and effectiveness of the method. The resulting illumination information can be used to synthesize more realistic relighting images and to recognize objects under variable illumination.

Realistic personalized face animation mainly depends on a picture-perfect appearance and natural head rotation. This paper describes a face model for generation of novel view facial textures with various realistic expressions and poses. The model is achieved from corpora of a talking person using machine learning techniques. In face modeling, the facial texture variation is expressed by a multi-view facial texture space model, with the facial shape variation represented by a compact 3-D point distribution model (PDM). The facial texture space and the shape space are connected by bridging 2-D mesh structures. Levenberg-Marquardt optimization is employed for fine model fitting. Animation trajectory is trained for smooth and continuous image sequences. The test results show that this approach can achieve a vivid talking face sequence in various views. Moreover, the animation complexity is significantly reduced by the vector representation.