MPEG-4 Book, The

9.2. Face and Body Animation

Personal communications are an important type of applications for the MPEG-4 standard. To improve the personal communication capabilities of the MPEG-4 standard, a special visual object was identified targeting the efficient representation of real persons and synthetic characters: the FBA object. The FBA object is useful for a wide range of potential applications, enabling direct or indirect personal communications, in contexts such as e-commerce, games, virtual teleconferencing, virtual kiosks, and call centers.

FBA provides tools for model-based coding of video sequences containing human faces and bodies. Instead of representing the faces and bodies as coded 2D raster images, the FBA object uses a 3D synthetic model ...