Facial expression cloning with elastic and muscle models

•We propose a new elastic model to improve the geometric warping results.•We propose a muscle-distribution model to improve the facial illumination details.•We design a new distance-based metric to decide parameters in the elastic model.

Expression cloning plays an important role in facial expression synthesis. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed for facial expression cloning. The proposed algorithm first introduces a new elastic model to balance the global and local warping effects, such that the impacts from facial feature diversity among people can be minimized, and thus more effective geometric warping results can be achieved. Furthermore, a muscle-distribution-based (MD) model is proposed, which utilizes the muscle distribution of the human face and results in more accurate facial illumination details. In addition, we also propose a new distance-based metric to automatically select the optimal parameters such that the global and local warping effects in the elastic model can be suitably balanced. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing methods.